git pull error message woes

Matthias Kestenholz· Jun 19, 2008, 07:32 UTC · lore

Hi,

I noticed strange behavior while pulling git.git today (this isn't new, it just occurred to me for the first time today that there is something wrong going on)

I run the 'pu' branch most of the time, and do not create a local branch because 'pu' is constantly rebased. I just run git checkout origin/pu after pulling (I know I should fetch if I don't want to fetch+merge, but it's hard to retrain the fingers)

Although I am on no branch ($curr_branch is empty), I get the error message from error_on_no_merge_candidates instead of being notified that I am on no branch currently. Something around line 150-160 in git-pull.sh does not seem to work as it should.

The reason might be, that every line in .git/FETCH_HEAD is marked as not-for-merge?

I don't know if that's the sign of a deeper problem or if it's just confusing behavior.

I tried fixing it myself, but got lost somewhere in the fetch machinery.

Matthias

Daniel Barkalow· Jun 19, 2008, 18:57 UTC · re: Matthias Kestenholz · lore

Re: git pull error message woes

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, Matthias Kestenholz wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> I noticed strange behavior while pulling git.git today (this isn't new,
> it just occurred to me for the first time today that there is something
> wrong going on)
> 
> I run the 'pu' branch most of the time, and do not create a local branch
> because 'pu' is constantly rebased. I just run git checkout origin/pu
> after pulling (I know I should fetch if I don't want to fetch+merge, but
> it's hard to retrain the fingers)
> 
> Although I am on no branch ($curr_branch is empty), I get the error
> message from error_on_no_merge_candidates instead of being notified that
> I am on no branch currently. Something around line 150-160 in
> git-pull.sh does not seem to work as it should.

There's no reason you couldn't pull when on no branch. It's just that, without a branch, there's nowhere to get a default ref to merge, which leads to having nothing to merge (if you don't give anything specific), which leads to that error.

On the other hand, you could do:

 git pull <some URL> <some branch>

and git would happily merge the specified branch of the specified repository for you. So the reason that git-pull doesn't give you the error you expect is that that's not necessarily an error at all.

	-Daniel
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