Re: [RFC] pull/fetch rename

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:22:35AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Some people thought that throwing everything that does something to remote
under "git remote" was a good idea, and "git remote update" was invented.
It is a thin wrapper around "fetch" and does what "fetch" does.  You need
to understand "fetch" (i.e. downloads the history and necessary objects,
and updates the remote tracking branches, without ever touching the work
tree) to understand "git remote update" anyway, and more importantly, you
need to understand what they do not do.

It is not even a typesaver.  "git fetch" updates from the default remote,
so does "git remote update".  Personally I think the people who invented
"git remote update" were misguided, and that is why I say it was a failed
UI experiment that failed, but that is hindsight talking [*1*].

Declaring it a failure depends on what you consider the goal of "git
remote update" to be. I find it very useful as a shorthand for "fetch
from _all_ remotes"[1]. Which does save typing over

  $ for i in `git remote`; do git fetch $i; done

And of course, there is "git remote" again, saving us a few keystrokes
over:

  $ git config --get-regexp 'remote..*.url' | cut -d. -f2

[1]: And I think this is a useful operation. When collaborating with
developers in multiple repositories, it is nice to see an overview of
what all other people are working on. We have other tools to actually
compare the refs, but the first step is obviously getting those refs up
to date locally.

-Peff