On 2 April 2012 22:40, Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> No more words from me on this subthread. > > It's a pity. I still have no answer to my question: > > | But why doesn't the same applies to "git pull"? Why would it be natural > | for "git pull" to pull from a branch other than the one with the same > | name? The choice of "fetch" and "pull" and "push" were in some respects unfortunate. They sound like opposites, but they are not. The very fact that you have two commands "pull" and "fetch" both of which are more or less the semantic opposites of "push" leads to confusion. And actually I find your use of "git pull" and "pull" in the expression "pull from a branch other than one with the same name" confusing. Barring misconfiguration pull operates on only one local branch and it is usually the one with the same name. However push operates on multiple local branches. So from the point of view of "what local branches are involved in the operation" the current default leads to inconsistency. If you had replaced "pull" with "fetch" then your argument somewhat makes sense, but IMO is overriden by the observation that "fetch" is essentially non-destructive, it modifies only local copies of the remotes state, and even if you consider that destructive it is destructive of your own data , push on the other hand *is* potentially destructive, and destructive of data on a remote system. Lastly I have never really encountered any confusion with explaining the default behaviour of git-fetch, nor actually git-pull, but I have encountered lots of confusion of people using git-push. They expect git-push to be the opposite of git-pull not git-fetch. Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/" -- 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