"Bence Ferdinandy" <bence@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> Ideally, because every "git fetch" you do will automatically learn >> what their HEAD of the day points at, even without "--set-head", it >> may be nice to let the user know when their HEAD changed, so that >> the user can inspect the situation and decide. > > That would actually make sense, we could print a message saying HEAD has > changed and I guess helpfully print the exact set-head command they would need > to manually update should they wish to do so. We need to be careful if we were to do this, though. A user may see that their HEAD points at their 'main' branch, and they know the remote-tracking HEAD points at 'next' branch. But the only thing the latter tells us is that 'next' is, as far as this user is concerned, the primary branch they are interested in from this remote. It may have been set earlier with "git remtoe set-head" explicitly, or it may have been set back when "git clone" created this repository and back then the remote had 'next' marked as its primary branch. In other words, the HEAD we learned from remote while we are fetching from it may or may not be the same from the remote-tracking HEAD we have, but it does not mean that the remote recently flipped its HEAD if these two are different, but what we want to report is "their HEAD used to point at 'master' but now it is pointing at 'main'". > So there will be no > extra flag for fetch, rather: > > - if the remote HEAD does not exist, we create it > > - if it does exist, but has changed we print a message saying it was changed from X to Y and print the required command to update to this > > - no configuration needed Very good, with two reservations. - if the remote HEAD does not exist, we may still not want to create it. Imagine [remote "his"] url = https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git push = refs/heads/maint push = refs/heads/master push = refs/heads/next push = +refs/heads/seen without any refspec for the fetching side. "git fetch his master" may learn where the remote HEAD is, and it may even be pointing at their 'master' branch, but because we do not maintain any remote tracking information for their 'master' (in other words, refs/remotes/his/master is not updated by this 'fetch' and there is no configuration to make future 'fetch' to do so). - it would be very nice to report when we notice that they changed their HEAD, but I do not think we have enough information to do so. Our existing refs/remotes/origin/HEAD may not have been set to match their HEAD in the first place. Thanks.
