Subject: Re: What is the default refspec for fetch?

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2014 05:52:21 -0500

On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 04:31:08PM +0100, Christian Halstrick wrote:

> In a repo where no remote.<name>.fetch config parameter is set what
> should a "git fetch" do? My experiments let me think it's
> "HEAD:FETCH_HEAD". Right?

Basically, yes. We always write FETCH_HEAD, regardless of the refspec.
We choose "HEAD" if no other refspec was provided. So it is really more
like

  git fetch $remote HEAD

This is what makes one-off bare-url pulls work, like:

  git pull git://...

It runs fetch under the hood, which writes into FETCH_HEAD, and then we
merge that.

-Peff