Feature Proposal: Track all branches from a given remote

Hello git experts:

Recently, I've encountered the problem where I would like to set my local repository copy to track all branches on a given remote. There does not appear to be a switch for this in the git-branch command currently, however, I will admit that my somewhat limited understanding of the git-branch manpage might be causing me simply not to see it.

It seems as though this is a use case that some users of git encounter now and then, as illustrated by this post:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/6300386/281460

I was thinking that it might be useful to add a new option to git branch, perhaps something like:

git-branch --track-remote <remotename>

Where <remotename> specifies a given remote, and the command will track all branches remotes/<remotename>/* to refs/heads/*.

So, for example, if I were to run:

git-branch --track-remote origin

and I had two branches on origin, master and maint, respectively, after the command finishes, my local repo would now have two branches, master (set up to track origin/master), and maint (setup to track origin/maint).

I'm not entirely sure how to handle naming conflicts, for example if 'maint' already existed on another remote, and was set up to track from that remote previous to this invocation of the command.

If I were to start work on a patch, would there be any interest in this feature, or are there reasons why it isn't currently implemented?

Thank you,

~Scott Johnson

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 04:34:30PM -0700, Scott Johnson wrote:

I don't know about a command line option for this, but I think there's a way to achieve what you're looking for.

You could do something like this in .git/config:

[remote "origin"]
  fetch = refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*

You won't be able to fetch if you would overwrite the current branch, though.

Hi Brian:

Yes, you're right, this works just fine as long as I move out from a branch that's not in the remote in question, for example by doing:

git checkout -b nothing git fetch

- OR -

git pull

Do you think there would be any interest in a patch that added this as a simple command line option, though? I guess the idea of this patch then would simply change this line in the .git/config file for the length of the operation (and specified remote), execute the git pull command, and then reset the configuration after the command finished. (There really wouldn't be a need to affect the configuration on the filesystem - simply the effective configuration used while git is running for this operation).

Thanks,

~Scott

Scott Johnson <jaywir3@gmail.com> writes:

There is no need to modify the configuration, you can pass the fetch spec on the command line.

Andreas.