Re: [PATCH v14 2/2] checkout: extend --track with a "fetch" mode to refresh start-point

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Harald Nordgren <haraldnordgren@gmail.com> writes:

> Ok, let's focus on the need for the feature before talking code:
>
> In an active project, forking from "origin/master" without refreshing
> first often has consequences: you start work that has already been
> done, or you build on an old version of the code which causes big
> conflicts only later when you pull. The fix is simple ...

The above only argues that contributors should not start work on top
of a stale codebase without looking at reasonably recent codebase.

I am not sure if automated fetch immediately before forking to start
work will be a good fix for that, especially if the fork of a new
branch is done blindly _without_ looking at what the updated
upstream contains.

> ... ("git fetch
> origin master && git checkout -b topic origin/master"), but it is
> still a mouthful. Other tools exist because this is annoying enough
> that people automate it.

And to actually look at the recent codebase, one would probably need

	git fetch
	git log [-p] ..origin -- your-area-of-interest/
	... other inspection of the recent changes to refresh your
	... understanding of the base code comes here
	git checkout -b topic origin

or something like that.  Wouldn't folding the first and the third
step into one operation encourage omitting the second step?  In a
sense, having a tool to let people blindly fetch and fork without
looking at what changed recently (i.e., they had a reason to think
that what they had was stale, so has a fetch actually resolved that
staleness?  what new things did the fetch bring in?) may encourage
a bad workflow.

An obvious complaint against "update and always inspect and
understand" would be "it would slow us down!", but that is why
projects encourage forking your topic at a well known release tags,
not from a random "tip of the tree of the day".

I think most of the above has already been communicated earlier in
discussions before we got to v14, but I may be wrong.  Are there any
new arguments in support of the feature?