Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

[Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>]

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On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:33:43 -0800 (PST), Linus Torvalds wrote:
> It's a lot more useful to have a merge message like
>
> 	Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://one.firstfloor.org/home/andi/git/linux-2.6
>
> than one like
>
> 	Merge branch 'for-linus'

There's more information in the first, sure. But I absolutely don't
accept that it's necessarily more useful, and definitely not that this
is a good argument for using pull with a remote branch instead of
fetch followed by merge with a local branch.

First, the pull may just fast-forward in which case there's no message
at all. And we've been through that topic enough recently that we all
know that no important information is lost by not doing any separate
recording in that case.

So you can't turn around and argue that the remote URL information is
suddenly important when it just so happens that it's not a fast
forward.

> And in a truly distributed situation, "pull" is strictly more powerful
> than a separate "fetch" + separate "merge".

I don't buy it. In my usage, I have several different remote
repositories I'm interested in tracking, each with any number of
branches. What I really want is an easy command that fetches all of
those branches, (even new ones that I've never heard about---but never
any of their "tracking branches" that wouldn't be of interest to
me). And I want to do that once, to get the online-access-required
part over with and get all the data into my local repository where I
can start working with it.

As for the URL from which I'm fetching all this stuff, it's really not
interesting to me at all. The URL for "Keith's stuff" keeps changing
anyway---I have no interest in recording that. But I do think it's
worth recording that the commits came from Keith's repository. I do
that right now with a keith/ prefix for his branches. It could also be
done by bringing in his .git/description during the fetch and storing
it somewhere. But I honestly don't see how storing something like that
during would make the system any less distributed in any sense.

-Carl

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