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From: "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste•net>
To: Bence Ferdinandy <bence@ferdinandy•com>
Cc: git@vger•kernel.org
Subject: Re: feature request: set remote/HEAD with fetch
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 21:55:00 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <Zr_KtAXQuFwEmFfI@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <D3HBD7C1FR14.74FL1Q1S9UCB@ferdinandy.com>

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On 2024-08-16 at 11:53:31, Bence Ferdinandy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> this comes after a bit of discussion on #git. The current behaviour of git is
> that when cloning, `refs/remotes/[remote]/HEAD` is set, but if you use `git
> init` and `git remote add`, then you must manually run `git remote set-head -a`
> to arrive at the same state. Having origin/HEAD set is pretty useful for
> scripting and aliases, because you don't need to remember what the current
> project uses (origin/[master|main|trunk|etc]).
> 
> I would propose that running `git fetch` should also update remote/HEAD. In
> case there is a possibility that it is useful in some cases that remote/HEAD is
> actually different from whatever is set in the remote repository as the default
> branch, I think a setting for opt-out would be better, and the default
> behaviour should be essentially always running `set-head -a`.
> 
> My current workaround is an alias:
>     fetchall = !git fetch --all && git remote | xargs -i git remote set-head -a {}
> 
> which works for me, but I think it would be more elegant not to have to do this.

I believe this would be a valuable change.  I know a lot of other users
want this features as well.  However, I think it needs to be opt-in,
since there are some cases where you want `git fetch` to specifically
fetch only certain objects or don't want to modify the refs. For
example, I know some server-side implementations use `git fetch`
internally and require refs to be updated in a special way, and they
would not appreciate extra refs appearing.
-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them or he/him)
Toronto, Ontario, CA

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  reply	other threads:[~2024-08-16 21:55 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2024-08-16 11:53 feature request: set remote/HEAD with fetch Bence Ferdinandy
2024-08-16 21:55 ` brian m. carlson [this message]
2024-08-16 22:10   ` Junio C Hamano
2024-08-17  5:02   ` Jeff King
2024-08-17 19:00     ` Bence Ferdinandy
2024-08-19 16:40       ` Johannes Schindelin
2024-08-20 21:38         ` Bence Ferdinandy

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