On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:17:30 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> writes:
>
> > It's more that I want a single way to talk about some branch I've just
> > published, (necessarily both a url and a branch), and I assume an
> > audience with a wide range of git experience, (from none to lots).
>
> Why would you want to add another syntax that can talk about
> only one branch?

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I'm fine with a space for a
separator instead of a '#'. I really didn't intend to get hung up on
that kind of syntactic issue.

The question is how much work is involved in getting from:

	Checkout my new work:

		<url> <branch>

to where the user can just start tracking it (read-only). Right now,
in many cases the user has to slice that up and pass the <url> to some
commands and the <branch> to other commands (see below).

> You can say instead:
>
>     I've just written some very fancy feature for our cool project
>     which is available in the <branch> branch at <url>. Please try
>     it out and give me feedback. [*1*]

OK, and I'll fill in the holes in your footnote. I'm perfectly fine
with assuming the user already has a clone of the project, (they can
find well-published instructions for that on the project site), so
then what's left is:

	*1* From within your git clone of the project, do the following (if
	    you haven't made a remote for my repository before):

		git remote add cworth <url>

	    Finally, you can start tracking my branch with the following:

		git fetch cworth
		git branch --track <branch> cworth/<branch>
		git checkout <branch>

	    And use "git pull" periodically to stay abreast of future work I
	    do on that branch.

That's workable, but notice that every occurrence of "cworth" in the
above is really getting in the user's way. Once a user knows a bit
more about git and remotes, it can be really useful to take advantage
of them. For example, when I'm interested in inspecting a newly
announced branch like this from someone for whom I have already setup
a remote I often do:

	git fetch <someone>
	git log ..<someone>/<branch>

And that's really nice and easy, (yes, multiple-branch tracking in a
single repository *is* the one true way).

But I don't think forcing the remote-creation on the user, (as in my
footnote), is actually making things easier.

-Carl