Tom Miller <jackerran@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> But what should happen when we do not give --prune to "git fetch" in >> such a situation? Should it fail, because we still have frotz/nitfol >> and we cannot create frotz without losing it? > > You talk about this to some extent in an email from 2009. I have linked > it below for your review. > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/132276 I do not think the old discussion talks about the case. It was about "we have remotes/origin/{frotz,nitfol} from the origin from an earlier fetch, the origin now has updated its frotz and deleted its nitfol. 'git remote prune' removes our remotes/origin/nitfol without updating our copy of remotes/origin/frotz, but I do not think it is sensible. 'git fetch --prune origin' would update both and make our remote-tracking branches for 'origin' in line with the reality". It was not about what 'git fetch' without '--prune' should do. Your "'git fetch' without '--prune' should be less destrictive" is a good guiding principle. If we have a copy of the 'frotz/nitfol' branch from the 'origin', removing it so that we can have a new copy of the 'frotz' branch the 'origin' now has (after it removed 'frotz/nitfol' to make room) is indeed an operation that loses information. And it probably is the right thing to do to fail such a fetch. 'git fetch --prune' on the other hand really means "I do not care about the branches' histories my 'origin' discarded; bring me up to date and give me the same view as my 'origin' has in my remote-tracking branches", so losing 'frotz/nitfol', which the 'origin' already decided to discard, is what the user wants. The atomicity issue Peff brings up is an interesting and important one, but I think that is an orthogonal issue. With the background information from the previous thread between you and trast, the patch [3/3] looks good to me. Thanks. -- 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