Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

Hi,

On Fri, 17 Nov 2006, Carl Worth wrote:

1. Making clone do the --use-separate-remotes behavior by default

Fully agree.

2. Taking advantage of that consistently for all branches instead of a
   special master:origin mapping in clone

Fully agree, too.

3. Enhancing git-fetch (or other) to modify .git/remotes, (or was
   there a desire for some other branch-specific section in the config
   file?)

I introduced the remote.<nick>.{url,fetch,push} entries into the config 
with the goal to enhance -fetch to remember the current command line with 
a setting. I was the only one to find that useful.

BTW I still would argue that it is better to write the remote information 
into the config, because you have a saner way to manipulate that from 
scripts than .git/remotes/<nick>.

4. Making git-fetch handle the disappearance of a remote branch
   gracefully

I think a message like "This remote branch no longer exists. Maybe you 
want to use 'git branch -d <branch>' to remove it locally?" should 
suffice.

5. Adding something like git-fetch --all to allow it to pick up all new
   branches

IIRC this idea was rejected, but I would find it useful. Especially with 
what Han-Wen said: you can store the branches you fetch with "git fetch 
--all <nick>" under .git/refs/remotes/<nick>/<branchname>.

6. Adding a "git update" that does a fetch for all appropriately
   marked remotes.

On this last point, maybe we do something like:

	update=no|yes|all

in .git/remotes. Then git-clone would set this up with update=all for
origin so git-update would do a "fetch --all" on the origin
repository. Then step 3 above would have to provide for setting this
update option as appropriate.

First thought was: it is only useful if you want to track multiple 
repositories. But next thought: if you mark the correct remotes in every 
of your local repositories, you don't have to remember which nick your 
upstream has. Yeah, I like it. But maybe do it as "git fetch --update" to 
avoid more cluttering of the bindir?

Ciao,
Dscho