On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 06:12:32 -0700, Carl Worth wrote:
> [2]	I've just written some very fancy feature for our cool project
> 	which you can see in gitweb at <gitweburl>. To track this
> 	branch, do "git remote add cworth <url>; git checkout --track
> 	-b <branch> cworth/<branch>" if you already have some clone of
> 	our project. Otherwise do "git clone <url>; git checkout
> 	--track -b <branch>". Please try it out and give me feedback.

Oops. I just noticed that that last command is wrong. Instead of "git
checkout --track -b <branch>" that should of course be "git checkout
--track -b <branch> origin/<branch>".

And no, I didn't intentionally botch that to be able to make a
point. But now, I will make the point: the current syntax is hard to
remember. It _is_ powerful, and I do personally use it and like it,
(and if I made the mistake above at the command line it would have
been obvious to me how to fix it, and would have been no big deal).

So I'm not suggesting replacing any of the remote stuff---I'd just
like to have something easier to suggest to people who aren't yet
familiar with remotes and remote-tracking branches, (and something
simple enough that I could get it right when writing an email without
git around to complain if I botch the syntax).

So I'd imagine "git track <url>#<branch>" as being implemented
directly with the existing remote stuff, (lookup and use an existing
remote for <url> if it exists, otherwise create a new one and name it
with some mangling of <url>, or complain politely if the mangling
would clash with an existing remote with the same name but a different
URL---which would be extremely unlikely).

Anyway, as usual I seem to find myself with just enough time and
motivation to talk about what I'd like, but not enough to code it up.
So feel free to ignore me if you disagree, and please feel free to be
inspired to code something up if you agree.

And thanks to everyone that has worked to make git so excellent!

-Carl