In the thread "git remote update -> rejected" Junio and Johannes came to
the conclusion that "--mirror means that you do not have local
branches", because "you give control away to the other end on the ref
namespace". Furthermore, it was agreed that --mirror currently makes
sense mostly (or only?) on a bare repository.
From here I gather that if you have "git remote add --mirror", most
likely the mirrored repository will be the only remote you have. There
is in general no point in having other remotes in a bare repository.
And so there is no loss of generality if this remote is the "origin" remote.
Hence, my proposal is:
1) Add an option to "git clone", to be used with --bare, to create a
mirror. --bare already leaves the original refs in place, without
moving them under refs/remotes/origin, so it makes sense to optionally
create the remote.
Actually you don't need to add a new option. Right now, specifying
-o/--origin together with --bare would give an error; in my proposal, if
you had "--bare --origin=source" a remote would be created in the config
file like this:
[remote "source"]
url = ...
fetch = +refs/*:refs/*
2) Modify the --mirror option to "git remote add", so that it creates a
remote *acting as a mirror of this one*. The config would look like this:
[remote "mirror"]
url = ...
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/mirror/*
push = +refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*
push = +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*
mirror
Now, I know that this is not what was proposed in the original --mirror
thread, and it is backwards-incompatible. On the other hand, I think it
has several advantages:
1) it does not add special cases such as "--mirror is only to be used in
a --bare repository". It moves the functionality to a combination of
options that used to give an error.
2) it provides an easy-to-use UI to create a mirror of this repository
somewhere. With a patch I already posted, "git push" would
automatically update this mirror.
3) overall, I think it makes a lot of sense: "git remote add" is about
adding one remote of many, and "git clone" is about setting up a single
special remote. Now, you can have many remotes that are
mirrored-from-here, while you can only have one remote that is
mirrored-to-here. So, I believe that "git remote add" should add
mirrored-from-here remotes, while "git clone" should be used to create a
mirrored-to-here remote.
Opinions?
Paolo
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