Re: [PATCH] add post-fetch hook

Junio C Hamano wrote:

If we _were_ to sanction the use of the hook to tweak the result, I do not
want to see it implemented as an ad-hoc hack that tells the hook writers
that it is _entirely_ their responsiblity to update the remote tracking
branches from what it fetched, and also update $GIT_DIR/FETCH_HEAD to
maintain consistency between these two places.

A very cursory look at the patch tells me that there are a few problems
with it.  It does not seem to affect what will go to $GIT_DIR/FETCH_HEAD
at all, and hence it does not have any way to affect the result of the
fetch that does not store it to any of our remote tracking branches.

True, it does not update FETCH_HEAD. I had not considered using the hook
that way.

I suppose that after running the hook, fetch could check each remote
tracking branch for a new value, and only then write to FETCH_HEAD.

quoted

The #1 point of confusion for git-annex users is the need to run
"git annex merge" after fetching. That does a union merge of newly
fetched remote git-annex branches into the local git-annex branch.

That use case sounds like that "git fetch" is called as a first class UI,
which is covered by "git myfetch" (you can call it "git annex fetch")
wrapper approach, the canonical example of a hook that we explicitly do
not want to add. It also does not seem to call for mucking with the result
of the fetch at all.

Most users are fetching by calling git pull as part of their normal
workflow. I would like to avoid git-annex needing its own special pull
command. For one thing, there can be many programs that use git branches
in similar ways (another one is pristine-tar), and a user shouldn't have
to run multiple wrapped versions of git fetch or pull when using
multiple such programs.

-- 
see shy jo