Re: Difficulties in advertising a new branch to git newbies

On 2/1/07, Josef Weidendorfer <Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de> wrote:
> On Wednesday 31 January 2007, Carl Worth wrote:
> > > It would be nice if:
> > >
> > > git clone -b ${branch} git://...
>
> Nice indeed.
>
> Additionally, it would be nice for clone to directly
> checkout tags. Why not an option "--checkout <ref>"
> to directly checkout <ref> after cloning?

Maybe, I'm not sure.

> > In addition, it would be great to have a command that did the same
> > setup within an existing repository.
>
> Why not use "git clone" for this?
> Currently, the man page says about the directory it will clone into:
>
>  "Cloning into an existing directory is not allowed."
>
> But we could relax this: if the specified directory is the root of
> a checkout (ie. with a .git subdir), we would clone a remote repository
> into the same local repository.

You can do it with git-remote. I think it is sensible to have a
command to get a new repository and a command to have a new remote.

For the "work on the non-HEAD branch" I think we could have:

# clone a remote repository and start working with branch ${branch}
$ git clone -b ${branch} ${url}

# add a new branch based on a remote branch,
# and configure to pull from there.
$ git branch ${branch} ${remote_branch}
$ git checkout -b ${branch} ${remote_branch}

as you see it is the current syntax, so I suggest to automatically
setup the branch.${branch}.{remote,merge} configs to follow the
${remote_branch} if this is sensible. So for example

$ git clone ${url_of_git.git}
$ cd git
$ git checkout -b maint origin/maint
$ git-config -l | grep ^branch.maint
branch.master.remote=origin
branch.master.merge=refs/heads/maint

( or branch.master.merge=refs/remotes/origin/maint )

This changes the current behaviour, but I think it make sense. If this
is not possible another way would be to have another option (-r for
remote, or -f for follow, or -p for pull, or -m for merge, ...) as:

$ git branch ${branch} -r ${remote_branch}
$ git checkout -b ${branch} -r ${remote_branch}

And if you want to add/change the remote/merge config for an existing
branch, in addition to doing this with git-config, git-remote could do
it as it currently shows the tracking branches.

Santi
-
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