Could this be done simpler?
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: 2016-06-15 22:46:59
Ok, so I have a practice of occasionally doing octopus merges when I have
two branches with trivial fixes from the same person.
That all works fine when they use the "multiple branches in the same
repository" approach (eg x86 "tip" tree), but other people tend to prefer
to use multiple repositories for different features, rather than branches.
And git generally lets you do things either way with no real difference.
But for the octopus case, it does make a difference. You can easily make
octopus merges only from one repository.
Which is kind of sad.
So I did kernel commit c6223048259006759237d826219f0fa4f312fb47 by
basically doing the 'git pull" logic by hand, and while this was just a
trial and maybe I'll never feel the urge to do it again, I'm wondering it
maybe we should make it easier to do.
Right now the "git pull" syntax is
git pull <repo> <branch>*
and you cannot specify multiple repositories, only multiple branches.
But at the same time, it should be pretty unambiguous whether an argument
is a repository or a branch (':' in a remote repository, or "/" or ".." at
the beginning of a local one - all invalid in branch names).
So it _should_ be syntactically unambiguous to allow
git pull (<repo> <branch>*)+
for the octopus case. Hmm?
Linus