Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@xxxxxx> writes:
>
>> Git uses the config for remote/upstream information in favor of the
>> previously-used .git/remotes/ and .git/branches/ for a decade now.
>
> The last time I thought about trying this several years ago, I found
> that people who need to grab things from many places still do use
> .git/branches/ and their use case is hard to migrate to .git/config,
> primarily because the former is "one per file" and it is easy to
> add/remove/tweak without affecting others. Ask akpm@ if he still
> prefers to use .git/branches/ for example.
FWIW, I do not think there is any reason for people to be using
.git/remotes/, but for .git/branches/, I do not think I can offer a
more efficient and easier to use alternative based on .git/config to
do these things:
$ grep <substring> .git/branches/* ;# what did I call that remote?
$ cat .git/branches/$name ;# where do I get that from?
$ echo "$URL#$branch" >.git/branches/$name ;# I just learned a new src
$ rm .git/branch/$name ;# I no longer need it
without having to learn things experienced CLI/UNIX person already
knows. We simply cannot beat the above with anything like
$ git config remote.$name.fetch refs/heads/$branch
even though the config based remote definition may be infinitely
more powerful.
> Is it really hurting us having to support these old information
> sources we treat as read-only?
And this one is also important. I do not think we had to touch any
code that handles .git/remotes/ or .git/branches when we extended
the .git/config based configuration for remotes, simply because the
old data source are pretty much frozen read-only places these days.