Re: How to check new commit availability without full fetch?

On Sun, 10 Jan 2010, Leo Razoumov wrote:

On 2010-01-10, Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Sun, 10 Jan 2010, Junio C Hamano wrote:
 >
 > A feel good factor is in play?  IOW, "I am short of time, so I won't be
 > able to really afford to 'git pull' and test the result of re-integrating
 > my changes to what happened on the other end.  If I can learn that there
 > is nothing happening over there, then I won't have to do anything and know
 > that I am up to date."


Just do a fetch then.  If the fetch progress display looks like if it is
 going to take a while then just interrupt it and go home.  If the fetch
 looks trivial then just merge it.  In any case, the "feel good" factor
 can't be that great by only knowing if the remote has changed or not.

Forced interruption is not such a good idea. I would favor a
non-destructive way to monitor availability of remote commits.

You still don't answer my question though.  Again, _why_ do you need to 
know about remote commit availability without fetching them?

BTW, pull and push are in a way symmetric operations. Is there any
deep reason why push supports --dry-run but pull/fetch does not??

Pushing involves resource usage on your own machine while 
pulling/fetching involves the remote machine.  Your choice to "waste" 
CPU cycles on your own machine is not the same as having anybody do the 
same on a central server.


Nicolas