"Bence Ferdinandy" <bence@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Your suggestion seems to be the original tri-state configuration that came up > in one of the original discussions. It was recently requested again for fetch > to just do this automatically > (https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAAHKNRGv19rhnqCkJMpE2FomNQBHvSS36aC=fh0UwO+9-6RRfA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx), > so at least some people would like to have this fully automated. And that is *not* the only option, and I am trying to help others by preventing unconditional warning messages from annoying them. > On the other hand: considering your points in the linked very early discussion, > maybe "warn" would be a better default? Those who want to stick to their manual choice would have to do an explicit set-head once, whether the default is "true" or "warn", so their inconvenience would not affect the choice of the default. I think "warn" is a good default _only_ for folks who want to verify and then expect they will follow what the upstream does 99% of the time. For them, when they do not want to switch to what the upstream says (which is the rest 1%), there is no good way to squelch the warning other than dropping the configuration, but then they will lose the ability to notice further flips at the remote after that, which may turn out to be a problem. Instead of "true", "warn", and "false", we might need "if it is set to _this_ value, do not warn and keep the current setting" to help those who cautiously only allow the remote affect what they use after inspecting, but expect that the choice made by the remote will not be outrageous most of the time for them. If we want to solve this completely for them, that is. I dunno. Those who want to blindly follow what the upstream says 100% of the time will have to switch to "true" just once manually, if the default were "warn", but once may be one time too many for them. And that is why I said "clone" (and "fetch" setting a non-existing HEAD automatically) may want to default to "true". > Fair point. > > This series has a tendency for growing in complication in each iteration :) Anytime somebody gets swayed by an opinion to add unconditional warning or unconditional futzing without considering that such a move may annoy some users that are different from the opinion giver, we need to make sure there are escape hatches. Under the assumption that most projects only flip HEAD very rarely, and considering the fact that we have lived with manual setting with set-head and nothing else, we could drop the automatic setting by "fetch" altogether to reduce the scope of the series without losing much *and* more importantly without harming existing users. I think we could make it a multi-step transition in order to keep changes to "git fetch" we make in each step smaller, which may go like so: 1) Let "git fetch" create missing remotes/$name/HEAD. No other changes. 2) Introduce a remote.$name.followRemoteHEAD that can say "the last branch we observed that they point at is 'main'". Set it when we clone, When "git fetch" notices that the remote flipped its HEAD to a different value, warn and update (which would give us the "warn only once, do not annoy users by constantly warning"). The user can delete the configuration to squelch "git fetch" (in other words, the repository does not remember the last setting, so we refrain from warning "it has changed since the last time"). No other changes. 3) Allow remote.$name.followRemoteHEAD to be set to 3-a) "always", which would squelch the warning and causes "git fetch" to always repoint the local remotes/$name/HEAD to whatever the remote says, 3-b) "warn", which would cause "git fetch" to warn when the remote's HEAD is different from local remotes/$name/HEAD, 3-c) "never", which would cause "git fetch" to even omit the "copy if it does not exist" we add in 1) to help those who deliberately want to keep remotes/$name/HEAD missing (to force themselves to be more explicit, saying things like "git checkout -b topic origin/maint" and "git rebase origin/master", but never "git checkout --detach origin"). And we can stop this round at the first step (plus any other changes outside "git fetch", like "set-head --auto"). Thanks.
