Jeff King wrote (2008-04-09 16:34 -0400): > On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 11:08:36PM +0300, Teemu Likonen wrote: > > $ git fetch <URL> > > > > would be equivalent to > > > > $ git fetch <URL> +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/<name>/* > This has been discussed before and rejected, because the point of > doing a fetch of a URL (rather than a remote name) is to do > a "one-off" thing. First, thank you for such a detailed information and giving somewhat different point of view from mine. Ok, "git fetch <URL>" has its own "point", as you noted, and no doubt it's for good reasons. I just had partially misunderstood its point. See below: > Almost nobody says "git fetch <URL>"; it is just a subpart of "git > pull <URL>" [...] Hmm, maybe. I recently wanted to join two purely local repos together. Both of them had just one branch. Totally different histories so no actual mergin would happen; just two branches in the same repo. I don't know why but "git fetch /the/other/repo/" just happened to be the one I tried first. I saw it fetched something but as no new branch appeared and I had never heard of this FETCH_HEAD thing it was a "didn't work, what should I try next?" thing. I think your idea of showing > From git://host/path/to/repo > * [new branch] foo -> FETCH_HEAD would be really good. At least to me this would have been enough information. As I'm starting to see the "point of doing fetch <URL>" I take back what I proposed. Just a bit more information would be nice. I have to agree with Ingo Molnar that sometimes Git is a bit un- or even disinformative about what happened. One example is this "git fetch <URL>". Maybe it's not a "sane thing to do" but users are like this. We just try something and learn from it. To me "git fetch <URL>" was a broken command (UI-wise) until I read your message (thanks again!). If Git had told me that it created FETCH_HEAD I had learned fetch's habits myself and likely wouldn't have come up with this "broken command" conclusion. Another thing I spoke of was this refs/ stuff. I know my way around with them now, so maybe they are not actually confusing to me anymore. It's just that I have noticed a pattern: I always use refs/heads/... in certain places and refs/remotes/ in certain places. If such a pattern is very common (well, I don't know if it is) one starts to think that maybe the pattern can/should be hidden and made part of the tool. Just thoughts. -- 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
