Hello,

I used to 'git pull' in a branch and it was working without any
questions asked. But now, if I do the following:

git checkout -b test
git pull

I get a warning telling me that "You asked me to pull without
telling me which branch ...". I would expect that my new local
branch behaves the same way as the master branch.

I am using 1.7.0.3

  -- aghiles
--

[ message continues ]

Heya,


When you do this you're telling git "I want a new branch from where I
am right now". If you want to be able to pull in a similar way to how
master works, use the '--track' option.

-- 
Cheers,

Sverre Rabbelier
--

[ message continues ]

This means that when pulling I will be pulling from the remote ? That
is what I want to achieve. I just want all my branches to pull from the
same remote (as my master branch does).

Thank you for your help.

  -- aghiles
--

[ message continues ]

Actually, the '--track' option is exactly what I don't want ! :) It tells me:

"Branch test set up to track local branch refs/heads/master."

Without the '--track' option it seems to work as expected: when I pull
it downloads data form the remote but then stops before merging.
This used to work! What happened ? :(

  -- aghiles
--

[ message continues ]

Heya,


See the --track documentation, you need to tell it to track upstream
instead of master.

-- 
Cheers,

Sverre Rabbelier
--

[ message continues ]

Read the doc. It is what you want, but you mis-use it.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/
--

[ message continues ]

I will read the doc, thank you for the advice.

'When creating a new branch, set up configuration to mark the start-point
branch as "upstream" from the new branch.'

So no, that's not what I want.

Using :
  git branch test
  git checkout test
  git pull origin HEAD

Is what I want and it works. BUT, I used to need only 'git pull'

Again, the behavior changed since I last used this. No one cares?

  -- aghiles
--

[ message continues ]

The behavior of Git did not change. The content of your configuration
file or the branch you are on did. The way to put the right content in
your configuration file is --track.

When you create a branch, you say what the starting point of your
branch is, and if you say --track, Git remembers it and uses it for
pull next time. The simplest is to start your branch based on
remotes/<name>/<branchname>, which is where your probably want to pull
from.

Otherwise, --set-upstream may help. But neither will help untill you
RTFM.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/
--

[ message continues ]

Matthieu, I spend my days reading the git manual and also the source
code, which is not normal IMHO. I always look for examples but in the
case of 'git branch' there is not many that are really useful!

I suggest to add this as an example since it is probably the most common
case (one would expect that a new branch simply mimics the characteristics
of the starting branch, no ?)

  git branch --track small_fixes origin

And it does what I want.

Again, the behavior changed: just upgraded to 1.7.0.3, before then I was
doing branches like this:

  git checkout -b small_fixes
  git pull

From my point of view, that was neat!

The --track and <start-point>=origin seemed to be implied. I find that this
is a better better default (OR 'git pull' was defaulting to 'git pull
origin HEAD').

As of now, 'git branch x' seem to be of little use without more configuration.

  -- aghiles
--

[ message continues ]

What was the old version of git? A long time ago (maybe 1.5.x or
earlier?) we used to default unconfigured pulls differently.

-Peff
--

[ message continues ]

I don't have the information handy but it was most probably pre-1.5.
I don't know if my 'branching habits' are common, but I found that
the old behavior to be more natural with the way we work (creating
branches for quick parallel work).

If the current behavior is here to stay, I would humbly suggest to
mention the 'git checkout -b x origin' syntax in the manual (and
'git branch --track x origin').

On a positive note, I would like to say that there is a good progress
regarding the messages git prints to guide the user. That is helpful.

  -- aghiles
--

[ message continues ]

OK, then the behavior did change for you. But you are probably about 3

It is in the checkout manual, but I think the subtlety that you missed
is that "--track" is going to care about whether you start your branch
from your local "master" or the remote "master". Even if they're at the
same commit, you are interested conceptually in basing your work on what
the remote is doing. Maybe we could talk about this in the definition of
<start-point>, I guess.

You may also be interested to know that "git checkout foo" these days
when you have no "foo" branch will do the equivalent of "git checkout -b
--track foo origin/foo", which would also do what you want.

-Peff
--

[ message continues ]

Dammit. :) But really no biggie. I just entered panic mode because I
thought something got borked in my favorite tool, which is not the case

Wouldn't that create/track a remote 'foo' branch ? I have no remote branches
but only local ones so I am always tracking origin/master.

  -- aghiles
--

[ message continues ]

Yes, it would, so I guess it doesn't help you. You should do "git
checkout -b foo origin/master", then.

-Peff
--

[ message continues ]

>>>>> "Aghiles" == Aghiles  <aghilesk@gmail.com> writes:


Aghiles> Using :
Aghiles>   git branch test
Aghiles>   git checkout test
Aghiles>   git pull origin HEAD

I do this:

    git checkout -b test origin/test
    ...
    git pull

And it seems to work.  It even announces that my test is tracking origin/test.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion
--

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Yes that syntax works too (although I use origin/master since I am tracking
the main branch and not the remote "test" branch). Thank you very much.

The message announcing the tracked branch is a nice touch.

  -- aghiles
--

[ message continues ]

So, do I understand it right that there is still no canonical syntax to
check out local branch tracking a remote one of the same name, without
spelling out the branch name twice?

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
http://pasky.or.cz/ | "Ars longa, vita brevis." -- Hippocrates
--

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Only if you don't count Dscho's DWIM.

    $ git checkout tr/word-diff
    Branch tr/word-diff set up to track remote branch tr/word-diff from origin.
    Switched to a new branch 'tr/word-diff'
--

[ message continues ]

Ugh. Right, so _this_ is what kept me from ever learning the proper way:

  (i) If you do `checkout B`, it will track remote branch B if it exists.

  (ii) If you do `checkout -b B`, it will never auto-track anything.

  (iii) If you do `git checkout -t -b B`, it will auto-track your current
_local_ branch.

This keeps getting me really confused, I hope I will remember it now for
good, but I have seen others having trouble with this as well. I don't
have immediate ideas that would do less harm than good to fix this up...

perhaps except changing (iii) to auto-track the remote branch B if it
exists and require tracked branch name if it doesn't - the current
default seems pretty much useless to me for usual cases. (I can imagine
a scenario where it would be useful, but not a common scenario where
this would be useful default.)

P.S.: The "--track without -b implies branch creation" sentence in
git-checkout(1) seems to be plain wrong?

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
http://pasky.or.cz/ | "Ars longa, vita brevis." -- Hippocrates
--

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$ git branch -r
  origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  origin/html
  origin/maint
  origin/man
  origin/master
  origin/next
  origin/pu
  origin/todo
$ git checkout -t origin/maint
Branch maint set up to track remote branch maint from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'maint'

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."
--

[ message continues ]

Ah! I have not read all the gory details carefully enough. Wonderful,

  (iv) If you do `git checkout -t R`, it will track branch R, deriving
local branch name B from it.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
http://pasky.or.cz/ | "Ars longa, vita brevis." -- Hippocrates
--

[ message continues ]

Dscho's DWIM ? I hope I don't have to learn that to use git efficiently! :)

  -- aghiles
--

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