[Question] Fetching a new branch from remote

Greetings,

I have a short question about git fetch. Say there is a new branch, call it 'new-branch' in a remote repository. I am interested in this branch and want to fetch it to 'new-branch' in my local to track its progress.

I would expect this to do it:

% git fetch -f <url> new-branch

But, it doesn't.

Actually, I just noticed that this accomplishes the desired result...

% git fetch <url> new-branch:new-branch

I also just noticed that the man pages only says that '-f' works on tags. Should it work on branches? Either way, it wasn't clear to me how to fetch a new branch from a remote and store it under the same name locally. In my opinion, git fetch -f should do this if given a branchname from the remote.

Carl

Carl Baldwin <cnb@fc.hp.com> writes:

First, '-f' means "allow overriding the fast-forward check when updating an existing branch". This can be done per refspec by saying "+rbranch:lbranch" but if you are fetching more than one remote branches at once (especially through "remotes" shorthand) the option can be used to allow override of all of them.

A single token <refspec> defaults to "<refspec>:" (meaning, "fetch but do not muck with our branches") is deliberate. When I get a pull request "please pull from git://u/r/l/ send2junio branch", I do not "git pull git://u/r/l/ send2junio" right away, but do "git fetch git://u/r/l/ send2junio" and inspect FETCH_HEAD with various combinations of "git diff master..FETCH_HEAD" and friends. I do _not_ want it to create send2junio branch in my repository with that. Also "git pull git://u/r/l/ send2junio" would internally run "git fetch git://u/r/l/ send2junio" and then runs merge, and I do not want that to create send2junio branch in my repository either. The latter could be prevented by adding an extra flag to git-fetch to tell it not to default a single token <refspec> to "<refspec>:<refspec>" and pass that flag from git-pull, though.

I just found out that the documentation for '-f' flag is simply missing. I'd propose to add the following. Thanks for noticing.

-- >8 --

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 14:09, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Hmm. Apologies. I had mentioned it back here, but didn't know what it did and so didn't document it:

        
    From: 	Jon Loeliger <jdl@freescale.com>
    To: 	git@vger.kernel.org
    Subject: 	[PATCH] Add --tags documentation, scraped from JC mail.
    Date: 	Mon, 7 Nov 2005 07:03:30 -0700 	

    Signed-off-by: Jon Loeliger <jdl@freescale.com>

    ---

    Thin territory here for me.  Feel free to alter if not right! :-)
    Also notice the lonely --force option still...

The documentation below does make this more clear. Now that you've explained it I can see it useful to fetch a remote head without creating a local one. I simply hadn't thought of this scenerio.

Thank you for the explanation.

Cheers, Carl

On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 12:09:01PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote: