Re: Pull without fetch

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 08 2019, Duy Nguyen wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 8:34 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> Damien Robert <damien.olivier.robert@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > is there a way to do a git pull without it running git fetch?
>> > Looking at the source in builtin/pull.c does not seem to indicate so.
>>
>> The reason behind that is because it does not make any sense for
>> "pull", which is meant as a quick short-cut to say "fetch && merge",
>> not to run fetch, especially back then when 'git pull' was designed,
>> the world was much simpler.  There was no "fetch && rebase", our
>> branches did not know what their @{upstream}s were.  In that simpler
>> world, what you are trying to do would have been:
>>
>>         git fetch
>>         # did I get anything worth integrating?
>>         git merge FETCH_HEAD
>>
>> That obviously would not work for those with "pull.rebase", and I do
>> not think it makes much sense to teach "git rebase" the same trick
>> to read FETCH_HEAD as "git merge" does in the above sequence.
>>
>> Others may have a better idea, but I do not immediately see any
>> solution better than inventing a new option to "git pull".
>>
>> Another and better option that may be harder to arrange is to make
>> sure that a no-op "git fetch" incurs very low cost.  If you did so,
>
> Not exactly related. But I often wish to see the list of branch
> updates since the last fetch. There's no easy way (that I know) to do
> this unless you copy the last fetch's output somewhere. If this "fetch
> at low cost" could simply read FETCH_HEAD and summarizes it like a
> normal fetch, that would be great. And it should also be very low cost
> because we only replay the last part (making summary) of normal fetch.

The ability to have this is something reftables will provide (from my
memory of a comment by Stefan Beller), which Christian Couder is working
on implementing these days.

>> "git fetch && git pull" would perform just like your "git fetch &&
>> git pull --no-fetch", and we won't need a new option at all.