On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 12:40:43PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > And yes, this is why you should NOT try to use the same naming as "hg", > for example. Last I saw, hg still didn't even have local branches, To > mercurial, repository == branch, and that's it. It was what I came from > too, and I used to argue for using git that way too. I've since seen the > error of my ways, and git is simply BETTER. Actually, that's not true. Mercurial has local branches, just as git does. Some people choose not to *use* this particular feature, and use the BK style repository == branch, but that's mainly because it's conceptually easy for them, and a number of BK refugees are very happily using Hg. It's probably because of the BK refugee population that after you do an hg pull, it will warn you that you need to do an "hg update" in order to merge the working directory up to the latest version that was just pulled --- and this change was made precisely because Hg supports local branches, and merging with the current branch isn't always the right thing, unlike with BK. > And the concept of local branches is exactly _why_ you have to have > separate "fetch" and "pull", but why you do _not_ need a separate "merge" > (because "pull ." does it for you). It's just that the semantics are different, and many developers have to use multiple DSCM's, depending on what project they happen to be developing on. So the reality is that there are people who have to use bzr, git, and hg, all at the same time. And while eventually newbies will figure out and remember that "git pull ." == "merge", the naming is simply confusing, that's all. (What does "pull" have to do with "merge"? It's not at all obvious.) For somoene who uses git full-time, and to the exclusion of all other systems, I'm sure it's not a problem at all. - Ted - 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