Junio et al, Git is a fast moving target, so some of this obviously needs a grain of salt. However, I'd like to make a couple of humble suggestions and ask one simple question. First, the question: Is there a syntax to git clone that creates the old-style branches? That is, you get all the branches locally, for people that either haven't learned "git branch -r" or have existing scripts that expect the branch to exist? I can't find anything in the git clone manpage. The suggestions are pretty simple. First, when behavior is changed invisibly (as the remote branch stuff was), can we note it in the documentation? I don't mean the ChangeLog, I mean the manpage. I personally already knew about "branch -r" because I read this list. A coworker of mine, who just uses git, spent an hour trying to find his branches after a clone with git 1.5. He thought his clone had failed. He read the manpage, and there was no big "Hey, those of you used to the old behavior, it changed!". The single sentence about "remote tracking branches" clearly isn't enough for folks that don't follow the development side. If we're going to take the liberty of changing expected behavior silently, we should be giving it its own section in the manpage. The second suggestion is related. When an invisible change has made the repository incompatible with older versions, we should make sure that things behave. We had some repositories cloned via 1.4.2. Do some work with 1.5.0.6 (on a different machine), then go back to the machine with 1.4.2, and 1.4.2 doesn't work. In fact, it can mess things up. He was doing simple things: pull from Linus, switch branches, etc. If this is going to be incompatible, then the newer stuff should at least warn about it, if not outright prevent 1.4 from running. These sorts of things make fast-moving changes workable. Joel -- Life's Little Instruction Book #356 "Be there when people need you." Joel Becker Principal Software Developer Oracle E-mail: joel.becker@xxxxxxxxxx Phone: (650) 506-8127 - 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
