On Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:13:44 -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
quoted text
> This one I can understand, but how would you propose to "update
> all branches", in other words what's your design for mapping
> remote branch names to local branch namespaces?

What I want here is a command "git update" that fetches and
fast-forwards the all branches which are designated as "tracking" a
branch in some known remote repository. And git-clone would setup all
branches appropriately so that they would be updated by git-update.

Additionally, it would be nice if git-update would also create new
tracking branches for all remotes repositories that had been
designated as being tracked, (and git-clone would do this as well).

There should also be a mechanism to easily create new tracking support
for specific branches or all branches of a repository, (could be "git
fetch URL branch" or "git fetch --all URL", for example).

With this kind of setup, I would use "git update" regularly, and only
ever merge locally. And by definition merging with any local tracking
branch would have just as much information available as "pull URL
branch" so the message would be the same.

I've been using git for 10-11 months, so I think I understand the
models fairly well, and I'd be really happy with a setup like that. I
also have talked with a fair number of (non-git-using) users who think
git is confusing, but I think would find the above scenario just fine.

In this scenario, git pull would still work just fine, but it would
also be much easy to teach a workflow that didn't use pull at all, so
if there's any git-pull confusion that's an actual problem, it could
be avoided.

Junio, what do you think of a setup something like that? I really
don't want to create a command other than "git" to implement it.

-Carl