Re: git pull and merging.

Josef Weidendorfer wrote:

On Wednesday 06 December 2006 11:05, Aneesh Kumar wrote:

quoted

[branch "devel"]
        remote = origin
        merge = devel

[....]
Now i thought merge should be local reference. So i changed it to
merge = remotes/origin/devel.

That also didn't work.

Then i tried the name of the branch should be indicated as
"refs/heads/devel" . That also didn't work.

So i guess i am missing something.

See man page of git-repo-config:

 branch.<name>.merge
  When in branch <name>, it tells git fetch the default
  remote branch to be merged.

I assume that the "devel" branch on the remote repo you cloned from
is also "devel", more exactly "refs/heads/devel".

Now, instead of "git pull", git should default to

	git pull origin refs/heads/devel:refs/remotes/origin/devel

this means the remote reference is refs/heads/devel and local tracking branch for that is refs/remotes/origin/devel.

ie. it should update the local tracking branch "refs/remotes/origin/devel"
with the remote branch "refs/heads/devel".
The tracking branch "refs/remotes/origin/devel" will be merged with current
branch afterwards.

That will be merged is the tricky part.

Now looking at the documentation for branch.<name>.merge, it talks
about the remote branch, which is "refs/heads/devel" in your case, ie.
the first part of the refspec of the full "git pull" command above.

This is most confusing part. What merge indicate is not about refs/heads/devel
should track refs/remotes/origin/devel. That is specfied in the remote config option.

What merge indicate is that when in a local branch ( not the tracking one under remotes/origin)
which branch from remote need to be used to merge to the local branch.

So, as you already posted (without explanation, therefore this mail),
the config should be

 [branch "devel"]
         remote = origin
         merge = refs/heads/devel

However, "devel" alone should work here, as it can be matched with remote
"refs/heads/devel". Seems to be a bug, as branch.<name>.merge seems to only
being compared with the full canonical name in the implementation.

I guess we need to have a standard way of saying the branches.

May be we want to document it in repo-config.

local branch on which changes can be made <branch-name>
local tracking branch refs/remotes/<remote-name>/<branch-name>
remote branch refs/heads/<branch-name>