Re: [Feature request] Separate explicit fetch mapping from default fetch selection

[Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>]

On 07/08/2026 03:42, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> "Douglas Puchalski (dpuchals)" <dpuchals@cisco.com> writes:
> 
>> Git version: 2.55.0
>> Environment: macOS 26.6
>>
>> I configure a remote to fetch only a small default set of branches:
>>
>>      [remote "origin"]
>>          fetch = +refs/heads/main:refs/remotes/origin/main
>>          fetch = +refs/heads/team/*:refs/remotes/origin/team/*
>>
>> This prevents `git fetch origin` from fetching and updating a very large
>> number of remote branches.
>>
>> When I explicitly request another branch:
>>
>>      git fetch origin topic/example
>>
>> Git fetches the branch into FETCH_HEAD but does not create or update:
>>
>>      refs/remotes/origin/topic/example

That annoys me too. There is a similar problem with the push refspec if 
you want to use it to map the refname rather than specify a default set 
of branches to push.

> I haven't thought things through, but I suspect that what you want
> might be an opposite of explicitly listing what is tracked on
> remote.*.fetch configuration, but having remotes/origin/* hierarchy
> of refs as the source of the tracking information.
> 
> It was a long ago this was invented, and I haven't used it for
> almost forever, but shouldn't this
> 
>      $ git fetch \
>              --refmap="refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*" \
>              origin topic/example
> 
> do what you want to do?  If so, perhaps it would make a good
> starting point to make it easier to use (e.g., perhaps a
> configuration variable can specify the refmap to be used, or
> something).

So we'd have something like "remote.<remote>.fetchMap" and 
"remote.<remote>.pushMap" that mapped refnames, but did not affect what 
gets fetched or push by default? That sounds useful (I've not thought 
through the interaction with the existing settings though).

One of my other bugbears about the refspec config is that the first 
matching one wins, rather than the longest match so you have to edit the 
config file rather than use "git config" to add a refspec that matches a 
sepcific branch, otherwise the default "refs/heads/*:..." that's created 
when the remote is added is used instead because it comes first.

Thanks

Phillip