From: Junio C Hamano Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:20:16 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH v14 2/2] checkout: extend --track with a "fetch" mode to refresh start-point Message-ID: In-Reply-To: Harald Nordgren writes: > Ok, let's focus on the need for the feature before talking code: > > In an active project, forking from "origin/master" without refreshing > first often has consequences: you start work that has already been > done, or you build on an old version of the code which causes big > conflicts only later when you pull. The fix is simple ... The above only argues that contributors should not start work on top of a stale codebase without looking at reasonably recent codebase. I am not sure if automated fetch immediately before forking to start work will be a good fix for that, especially if the fork of a new branch is done blindly _without_ looking at what the updated upstream contains. > ... ("git fetch > origin master && git checkout -b topic origin/master"), but it is > still a mouthful. Other tools exist because this is annoying enough > that people automate it. And to actually look at the recent codebase, one would probably need git fetch git log [-p] ..origin -- your-area-of-interest/ ... other inspection of the recent changes to refresh your ... understanding of the base code comes here git checkout -b topic origin or something like that. Wouldn't folding the first and the third step into one operation encourage omitting the second step? In a sense, having a tool to let people blindly fetch and fork without looking at what changed recently (i.e., they had a reason to think that what they had was stale, so has a fetch actually resolved that staleness? what new things did the fetch bring in?) may encourage a bad workflow. An obvious complaint against "update and always inspect and understand" would be "it would slow us down!", but that is why projects encourage forking your topic at a well known release tags, not from a random "tip of the tree of the day". I think most of the above has already been communicated earlier in discussions before we got to v14, but I may be wrong. Are there any new arguments in support of the feature?