On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 12:07:19AM +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote: > >> > So in that sense, it is poorly named, and "--branches" (or "--heads") >> > would be more accurate. At the same time, it is probably more likely >> > what the user wants to do (you almost never want to push "refs/remotes", >> > for example). >> >> But you do want to push tags, and --all --tags doesn't sound right; if >> I'm pushing everything, why do I specify I want to push more stuff. >> And then, why it --all --tags disallowed? > > I agree that "--all --tags" looks silly. I don't know why it's > disallowed; from my reading, it should be a perfectly sensible > operation. You might try digging in the history or the mailing list. Yeah, I might do that. >> > So I am a little hesitant to suggest changing it, even >> > with a warning and deprecation period. >> >> It is confusing and wrong, what more reason do you need? > > Because I am worried that "--all" pushing refs/remotes will also be > confusing; it's not what most people are going to want. > > If your suggestion is to deprecate the name "--all" and start calling it > "--branches" or "--heads", then that is an improvement. But making > "refs/*:refs/*" easier to accidentally use might not be. That's what I meant; replace --all with --branches (remember heads is a plumbing name). >> > and then it really is just a special way of spelling "refs/heads/*". But >> > then, I also think it's good for users to understand that the options >> > are refspecs, and what that means. It's not a hard concept, and then >> > when they inevitably say "how can I do BRANCHES, except put the result >> > somewhere else in the remote namespace", it's a very natural extension >> > to learn about the right-hand side o the refspec. >> > >> > Of course I also think BRANCHES looks ugly, and people should just learn >> > "refs/heads/*". >> >> Look, I'm all in favor of people learning stuff, but I have been >> involved in Git since basically day 1, and up to this day I was (am?) >> not familiar with refspecs, I don't use them regularly, and never >> really had a need to, and that's fine. People are already complaining >> about the learning curve of git, and what you are suggesting is that: >> >> Instead of doing: >> % git push remote --branches --tags >> >> They should do: >> % git push remote 'refs/heads/*' 'refs/tags/*' > > Sorry, I should have been more clear with what I wrote. My "of > course..." was more of a tangential "well, this is so far from what my > gut tells me is reasonable that I'm not sure my definition of ugly is > even relevant here". > > For me personally as a user, I prefer learning how a tool actually works > at its core (in this case, refspecs), and then applying syntactic sugar > to simplify usage. But I also respect that not everybody feels that way. > >> I'm not going to investigate the subtleties of these different setups, >> I'm going to put my common user hat and ask; how do I fetch as a >> mirror? > > The problem with that question is that you haven't defined mirror. Does > that mean you just want pruning, or does it mean that you want your > local ref namespace to match that of the remote? Exactly, no mirror has been defined, because I don't want a mirror. A mirror is supposed to have all the refs in sync all the time; that's not what I want. > Git should be able to do each of those cases. And I think it's fine to > have a less cumbersome syntax to specify them. But it's also important > that we don't over-simplify the terms so much that they get option A > when they wanted B. > > BTW, right now there is "git remote add --mirror ...", which sets up the > fetch refspec for you (in this case, mirror is "make your refs look like > the remote's"). Perhaps rather than adding syntactic sugar to fetch, it > would be best to channel users into configuring a remote that selects > from one of a few common setups (including different types of mirrors). But that assumes that they would want the same refspec operation *all the time* which is not the case (at least for me). Sometimes I want to update only existing branches, sometimes I want to fetch new branches too, sometimes I want to prune local branches, sometimes not. > It's not as flexible (I can't do a one-off mirrored push without using > actual refspecs), but my guess is that most users would want to set up > an actual remote, and picking from a set of configuration recipes would > be the ideal interface for them. I don't think so. I doubt users would like a refspec that will delete their local branches *always*; sometimes they would want to prune the remote tracking branches. >> > And "--prune-local" doesn't seem like a fetch operation to me. Either >> > you are mirroring, and --prune already handles it as above. Or you are >> > interested in getting rid of branches whose upstream has gone away. But >> > that's not a fetch operation; that's a branch operation. >> >> This would make things more confusing to the user. >> >> Say on one side I do this push? >> % git push test --prune 'refs/heads/*' 'refs/tags/*' >> >> What do I do in the other side to synchronize the repo? >> % git fetch test --prune-local 'refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*' >> 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*' > > No, you would just do "--prune", because your refspecs are _already_ > indicating that you are writing into the local namespace, and anything > you have locally would be deleted by the prune operation. I.e., there is > no need for --prune-local in this scenario; --prune already does what we > want. That's very risky. The user might forget that this is a mirror repo, and delete the local branches unintentionally. Plus, it would be then impossible to prune remote tracking branches. >> I would prefer this of course: >> % git fetch test --all --prune-local >> >> But you are saying it should be: >> % git fetch test 'refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*' 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*' >> % git branch --prune-remote test >> >> That doesn't sound right to me; mixing branch operations with a specific remote? > > I was trying to outline a situation where "--prune" wouldn't be > sufficient, which is: > > : we make some topic branch based on another branch > $ git checkout -b topic-Y origin/topic-X > > : later, we (or someone else) deletes topic-X upstream > $ git push origin :topic-X > > : now we fetch using the regular default refspecs, which put > : everything in a separate remote. But we ask to prune, so that > : deleted branches will go away. > $ git fetch --prune origin > > Now origin/topic-X doesn't exist, even though it's configured as the > upstream of topic-Y. Fetch doesn't enter into the picture, because it is > configured to only touch items in refs/remotes/. That's only by default. > As a user, how do I resolve the situation? I might say topic-Y is > obsolete and get rid of it. I might rebase it onto another branch. Or I > might declare it to have no upstream. But all of those are branch > operations, not fetch operations. Yes, but that has nothing to do with the operation I want to achieve: git remote sync. By which I mean synchronize the local branches with the branches of a certain remote. Note that in this sync operation, the upstream branch is irrelevant. > So what I was trying to say was that either your fetch refspecs tell > fetch to write into your local branch namespace, or not. If they do, > then --prune is sufficient (with no -local variant required). If not, > then touching your local branch namespace is outside the scope of fetch. I don't want this to be a *permanent* configuration. I see this similar to --force. You can achieve the same by adding a + at the beginning of the refspec, but this is something that should be activated on a per-command basis, thus the option. I think this should be the same. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras -- 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