On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted text
> Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:
> 
> > "You pull the remote changes with 'git-pull upstream,, then you can 
> > merge them in your current branch with 'git-merge upstream'."
> >
> > Isn't it much simpler to understand (and to teach) that way?
> 
> If it were "you download the remote changes with 'git download
> upstream' and then merge with 'git merge'", then perhaps, but if
> you used the word "pull" or "fetch", I do not think so.
> 
> I would be all for changing the semantics of "pull" from one
> thing to another, if the new semantics were (1) what everybody
> welcomed, (2) what "pull" traditionally meant everywhere else.
> In that case, we have been misusing it to be confusing to
> outsiders and I agree it makes a lot of sense to remove the
> source of confusion.  But I do not think CVS nor SVN ever used
> the term, and I was told that BK was what introduced the term,
> and the word meant something different from what you are
> proposing.
> 
> You have to admit both pull and fetch have been contaminated
> with loaded meanings from different backgrounds. I was talking
> about killing the source of confusion in the longer term by
> removing fetch/pull/push, so we are still on the same page.
> 
> That's where my "you download from the upstream and merge" comes
> from.

But the fact is that HG (which has a growing crowd of happy campers, 
maybe even larger than the BK crowd now) did work with and got used to a 
sensible definition of what a "pull" is.  This means that their 
definition is becoming rather more relevant with time than what it used 
to, and because it is a saner definition than what GIT has for the same 
word which HG users really have no issue with, I think we really should 
leverage the "common wisdom" and consider aligning ourselves with them 
in this case rather than trying to go into a totally different 
direction.  We simply won't gain anything trying to teach people "a pull 
in HG is a download in GIT".  If a pull becomes the same thing for both 
then it's one less oddball in the GIT interface.


Nicolas
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html