Re: What should "git fetch origin +next" should do?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 12:20:02AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> I just tried to update one of them with "git pull --ff-only", and after
> seeing that the fetch phase failed with non-ff on 'next', ran
> 
> 	$ git fetch origin +next
> 
> which happily copied the tip of updated next to FETCH_HEAD and nowhere
> else. Of course, a colon-less refspec means do not store it anywhere,
> i.e. "<colon-less-refspec>" === "<colon-less refspec>:", so prefixing it
> with '+' to force would logically be a no-op.  But it nevertheless was
> somewhat surprising and irritating.

I don't see that this has anything to do with the "+" at all. If I said:

  $ git fetch origin next

I think the exact same confusion exists. I told git to update 'next'
from origin, but it didn't touch refs/remotes/origin/next. You and I
both know what is happening, because we understand that "next" is a
refspec, and that it has no RHS.  But I suspect that is not how many git
users think of it.

We've discussed this before, of course:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/127163/focus=127215

-Peff