Re: Globbing for ignored branches?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 12:00:16PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 07:32:22PM +0100, Markus Trippelsdorf wrote:
> >
> >> > However, you do have to specify each branch individually. You probably
> >> > want to say "all branches except X", and you cannot currently specify
> >> > a negative refspec like that.
> [...]
> The end result might be not so hard in the mechanical sense, but
> designing the interface would be hard.  I do not offhand think of a
> good way to do this.

I had imagined a "not" token at the front of the refspec, like:

  git fetch origin +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* ^refs/heads/foo

In this case, a colon in the refspec would be an error. An alternative
would be:

  git fetch origin +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* refs/heads/foo:

I.e., to say "put foo to nowhere". But generally refspecs do not affect
each other. So "refs/heads/foo:refs/heads/bar" would generally work _in
addition_ to the other refspec. Making the "null destination" work
differently might be confusing.

I dunno. I have not thought very hard on the topic, so maybe there are
some subtle cases I am missing.

-Peff