Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes:
> I think the situation is better than that. We are surfacing the remote
> HEAD here, and there is already a command for copying that to our local
> tracking symref: "git remote set-head origin -a", which will set up
> refs/remotes/origin/HEAD.
>
> I think there are two ways we could improve that further:
>
> - making it more natural to pick up or update the remote HEAD via
> fetch; Felipe's patches to git-fetch look good to me
I do not mind that as an option (not the default) to the "git fetch"
command. But I think Ævar was driving at the lack of a scriptable
building block.
> - it might be nice to be able to have some equivalent to the dwim "git
> checkout foo" that creates a new "foo" based off of origin/foo.
> Doing "git checkout origin/HEAD" will detach the HEAD. I think right
> now you'd have to do something like:
>
> tracking=$(git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD)
> branch=${tracking#refs/remotes/origin/}
> git checkout -b $branch $tracking
Meaning "git checkout origin" would look at origin/HEAD and find the
remote-tracking branch it points at, and uses that name? I think
that does make quite a lot of sense. You are correct to point out
that not just "git checkout origin/HEAD", but "git checkout origin",
currently detaches the HEAD at that commit, if you have origin/HEAD
pointing at one of the remote-tracking branches.
But if we were to make such a change, "git fetch" shouldn't
automatically update remotes/origin/HEAD, I would think. It does
not matter too much if we are talking about a publishing repository
where the HEAD rarely changes (and when it does, it is a significant
event that everybody in the downstream should take notice), but if
you clone from a live repository with active development, you do not
want to lose a stable reference to what you consider as the primary
branch at your origin repository.
> Or maybe not. It's not something people probably need to do a lot.
> And if the point is to have plumbing commands that can do the same,
> then maybe those commands are sufficient.
