Re: Your branch and 'origin/master' have diverged

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:22:28PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

quoted

The updated rule would be more complex.  If a remote nickname is
used, and a refspec given from the command line is without colon, a
new special rule overrides the current behaviour and tries to match
with a configured refspec.  You would need to desribe what happens
in that case.

It would be something like this.

When you tell "git fetch" to fetch one or more refs from a
configured remote by explicitly listing them on the command line,
e.g.

    git fetch <remote> <name>...

each <name>... goes through the following process:

    - The <name> is turned into the full ref at the remote that
      starts from refs/ form by applying the usual fetch dwimmery
      (if <name> is a name of a branch, "refs/heads/<name>" would
      likely to be the one that is fetched).

    - Then, configured fetch refspecs for <remote> is looked up from
      remote.<remote>.fetch configuration variable(s), or "Pull: "
      line(s) of .git/remotes/<remote> file.

    - If the LHS of a refspec found in the previous step matches the
      full ref we computed in the first step, then the ref at the
      RHS of the refspec (i.e. remote tracking branch), if any, is
      updated.

If there is no configured refspecs that match the name given from
the command line, no remote tracking ref is updated.

That is almost exactly what my patch does, except I am not sure that it
respects the "without a colon" bit from your first message.

Yeah, I forgot to repeat it in this message, but the above
three-bullet list needs the 0-th item

 - If <name> has already colon in it, following special case rules
   do not apply.

in front of it.

Even though I suspect the updated behaviour may be more useful for
casual users (while making the semantics a bit more difficult to
explain, like the above documentation update), it is a major
regression to existing users if it closes the last escape hatch, so
I guess with your patch we are almost there but not quite there yet.