On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, Nicolas Pitre wrote: > > But the fact is that HG (which has a growing crowd of happy campers, > maybe even larger than the BK crowd now) did work with and got used to a > sensible definition of what a "pull" is. Guys, before you start thinking this way, the fact is, there's a lot of happy git users. So the reason for using "git pull" is - bk did it that way, and like it or not, bk was the first usable distributed system. hg is totally uninteresting. - git itself has now done it that way for the last 18 months, and the fact is, the people _complaining_ are a small subset of the people who actually use git on a daily basis and don't complain. So don't fall for the classic "second system syndrome". The classic reason for getting the second system wrong is because you focus on the issues people complain about, and not on the issues that work well (because the issues that work fine are obviously not getting a lot of attention). If you think "pull" is confusing, I can guarantee you that _changing_ the name is a hell of a lot more confusing. In fact, I think a lot of the confusion comes from cogito, not from git - the fact that cogito used different names and different syntax was a mistake, I think. And that '#' for branch naming in particular was (and is) total braindamage. The native git branch naming convention is just fundamentally much better, and allows you to very naturally fetch multiple branches at once, in a way that cogito's syntax does not. So when I see suggestions of using that brain-damaged cogito syntax as an "improvement", I know for a fact that somebody hasn't thought things through, and only thinks it's a better syntax beause of totally bogus reasons. I do agree that we probably could/should re-use the "git merge" name. The current "git merge" is an esoteric internal routine, and I doubt a lot of people use it as-is. I don't think it would be a mistake to make "git merge" basically be an alias for "git pull", for example, and I doubt many people would really even notice. But the fact is, git isn't really that hard to work out, and the commands aren't that complicated. There's no reason to rename them. We do have other problems: - default branch selection for merging is broken (it should definitely take the current branch into account). When I do "git pull" with no branch specification, and I happen to be on a branch that is associated with something else than "master" in the remote, I shouldn't merge with master. - I agree that having to create temporary branches to just look at a tag that you don't want to actually develop on is just unnecessarily bothersome. But trying to rename "pull" (or the "git" name itself) is just going to cause more confusion than you fix. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html