Re: Question regarding git fetch

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Jeff King<peff@peff.net> wrote:
> I don't think the colon is the issue. Consider the same situation, but I
> say:
>
>  # but today let's demo it first
>  $ git fetch origin master
>  $ git checkout -b demo FETCH_HEAD
>
> I'm still screwed. The issue is that you consider your configured
> refspec destinations to be precious, and not merely a cache for what's
> happening on the remote side.

Is the "precious remote ref" concept perhaps an imaginary one?

After all, if I *really* care about the prior state of the remote, I
can just make it a remote branch.  And if (as often happens) I just
want to know what's new in that ref since last time I merged, it's
simply

   git log master..origin/master

This works even if master has extra commits vs. origin/master, since
the double-dot invokes git-merge-base.

I think this might be a much more common than the case where people
actually want to see "what's changed since last time I checked what's
changed."  At least, the latter question has never been very
interesting to me, or if it is, it's easy for me to tell by eye.

Avery