Re: [RFC/PATCH] Add fetch.updateHead option

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

On Wed, Nov 18 2020, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> Users might change the behavior when running "git fetch" so that the
> remote's HEAD symbolic ref is updated at certain point.
>
> For example after running "git remote add" the remote HEAD is not
> set like it is with "git clone".
>
> Setting "fetch.updatehead = missing" would probably be a sensible
> default that everyone would want, but for now the default behavior is to
> never update HEAD, so there shouldn't be any functional changes.
>
> For the next major version of Git, we might want to change this default.
>
> Signed-off-by: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
> ---
>
> This is just a RFC, the tests are missing.

I haven't taken much time to re-think through the patch/implications of
this, but I remember running into this and going through some pre-patch
investigation at some point.

It's really annoying in some cases that "clone" isn't creating the same
state as "remote". IIRC I was doing some heuristics to figure out the
remote branch name etc.

Isn't this something we can just change without an option? There were a
bunch of cases in clone/fetch that were different for no different
reasons, IIRC I patched one or two of those in the past. But I haven't
gone through the history of the feature and checked if it was
intentional.