Re: How can I tell if a file has been updated upstream?

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>
Date: Feb 5, 2010, 17:39 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1002051235000.1681@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <ed82fe3e1002050856v68d4d02bnbe18394bebac2f4d@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 5 Feb 2010, Timur Tabi wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> So maybe you meant this:
> 
> $ git ls-remote ssh://git.am.freescale.net/git/timur/bin refs/heads/master
> 20fbe12069038057cbd0d66c5a673956f7792c7d	refs/heads/master
> 
> I can use this to compare with the local HEAD.  However, this only
> tells me that the repository as a whole has changed.  I was hoping
> there would be a way to see if just the one file has change.  I.e. how
> can I get the HEAD of a *file* in a remote repository.

You can't.

You must perform a fetch and then use whatever method to compare with origin/master:foobar.py which is the file you're looking for.

> Yeah, I'm not keen on performing an actual download, even if it's just a fetch.

Why? It is not like if a fetch was terribly more costly than any method that could get the version of a file on the remote.

Nicolas