Re: How to check new commit availability without full fetch?

[Leo Razoumov <slonik.az@gmail.com>]

On 2010-01-11, Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Jan 2010, Leo Razoumov wrote:
>
>  > On 2010-01-10, Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net> wrote:
>  > >
>  > > You still don't answer my question though.  Again, _why_ do you need to
>  > >  know about remote commit availability without fetching them?
>  > >
>  >
>  > I use git to track almost all my data (code and otherwise) and spread
>  > it between several computers. I end up with several local repos having
>  > the same local branches. It happens once in a while that I fetch into
>  > a given remote/foo from several local foo branches from different
>  > machines and the operation fails. It happens because the commits have
>  > not been yet consistently distributed among the repos. To do the
>  > forensics and figure out who should update whom first I need a quick
>  > and non-destructive way to fetch dry-run.
>
>
> There is probably something awkward about your setup then.
>
>  Normally you should have a remote description for any of the remote
>  repositories you fetch from.  So if you have, say, remote machine_a with
>  repo foo, machine_b with repo bar, and machine_c with repo baz, then
>  fetching any of those will _only_ mirror locally the state of those
>  remote repositories.  There is no ordering required as there can't be
>  any conflicts in the mere fact of mirroring what the other guys have.
>  That's what remote tracking branches are for: they follow the state of a
>  remote repository and are never altered by local changes.  And you can
>  have as many of those as you wish and they will never conflict with each
>  other as each remote description is independent. And this is true
>  whether or not the remote repository lives on the same machine (that
>  would be a remote directory in that case).
>

Setup might be, indeed, awkward but it handles very diverse tasks.
As I said in my earlier emails different repos fetch into the *same* remote/foo.
So there could be conflicts and using fetch -f could cause loss of data.

Before switching to git I used mercurial for the same purpose and it
has command that are equivalent to fetch --dry-run.

--Leo--