On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 12:20:02AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > I just tried to update one of them with "git pull --ff-only", and after > seeing that the fetch phase failed with non-ff on 'next', ran > > $ git fetch origin +next > > which happily copied the tip of updated next to FETCH_HEAD and nowhere > else. Of course, a colon-less refspec means do not store it anywhere, > i.e. "<colon-less-refspec>" === "<colon-less refspec>:", so prefixing it > with '+' to force would logically be a no-op. But it nevertheless was > somewhat surprising and irritating. I don't see that this has anything to do with the "+" at all. If I said: $ git fetch origin next I think the exact same confusion exists. I told git to update 'next' from origin, but it didn't touch refs/remotes/origin/next. You and I both know what is happening, because we understand that "next" is a refspec, and that it has no RHS. But I suspect that is not how many git users think of it. We've discussed this before, of course: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/127163/focus=127215 -Peff -- 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