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

From: Timur Tabi <timur@freescale.com>
Date: Feb 5, 2010, 16:56 UTC
Message-ID: <ed82fe3e1002050856v68d4d02bnbe18394bebac2f4d@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100205164407.GA27498@spearce.org>

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 10:44 AM, Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

> You can't tell a particular file, but you could use something like
> `git ls-remote refs/heads/master` to see what the branch is at,

$ git ls-remote refs/heads/master fatal: 'refs/heads/master' does not appear to be a git repository fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

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.

> I do this in repo, only I run `git fetch` once per day for the
> end-user.  That way the objects are local, and I can use a local
> check to see if there are updates that need to be pulled into the
> executable working directory.

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

-- 
Timur Tabi
Linux kernel developer at Freescale