Re: Globbing for ignored branches?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 24, 2014, 21:08 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqeh3xqe91.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20140124204825.GA17167@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> I had imagined a "not" token at the front of the refspec, like:
>
>   git fetch origin +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* ^refs/heads/foo
>
> In this case, a colon in the refspec would be an error. An alternative
> would be:
>
>   git fetch origin +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* refs/heads/foo:
>
> I.e., to say "put foo to nowhere". But generally refspecs do not affect
> each other.

Not really. You do not have to view it as "'not refs/heads/foo' is affecting the previous '+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*'".

You can think of two refspecs "refs/heads/foo refs/heads/bar" are both affecting the "end result"; so far we only had a single way for multiple refspecs to affect the end result and that was a "union". Introducing "subtract" as another mode of combining is not too bad, I would think, at the conceptual level.

> ... Making the "null destination" work
> differently might be confusing.

I tend to agree that "refs/heads/foo:" is being too cute and may be confusing, at least if it will be the only way to express this in the end-user-facing UI. Even some people were confused enough on a very sensible "push nothing to ref means deletion" to make us add another explicit way, "push --delete", to ask for the same thing.