Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

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On Thu, 16 Nov 2006, Carl Worth wrote:
>
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:30:55 -0800 (PST), Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > The form I use is actually a lot simpler (conceptually) than the "short"
> > form.
> >
> > When you do
> >
> > 	git pull <reponame> <branchname>
> 
> Yes, that's what the user almost always wants. The UI problem here is
> that the conceptually simpler form is syntactically longer, (which
> means users aren't likely to find it).

Yeah. 

And this is something I absolutely agree with. Our default branches for 
"pull" are horrible. You can "fix" it, but you can only fix it by adding 
_explicit_ branches to your .git/config file by hand, so I don't think 
that's actually a real fix at all. We should just fix the default (where 
even a "I don't know what branch you want" _error_ would be preferable 
over the current situation).

Along with the "git checkout <tag>" thing, I think these two things are 
definitely worth just fixing.

> The behavior is sane, but having to always type the branch name
> specifically because it never changes... that's a user-interface bug.

Yeah. Each branch should

 (a) have a "default source" initialized on the initial "clone"

 (b) have a way to set the source afterwards

 (c) error out if you do just a "git pull" or "git pull remotename" if 
     there is no default branch for the current local branch for that 
     remote.

We actually have (b) in a weak form right now ("weak" because it requires 
you to manually edit the config file: we've got the mechanism, but not a 
nice UI for it), but (a) and (c) are just broken.

And yeah, we should allow pulling into a branch that hasn't been 
initialized.

		Linus
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