Re: Pull without fetch

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

Damien Robert <damien.olivier.robert@gmail.com> writes:

> is there a way to do a git pull without it running git fetch?
> Looking at the source in builtin/pull.c does not seem to indicate so.

The reason behind that is because it does not make any sense for
"pull", which is meant as a quick short-cut to say "fetch && merge",
not to run fetch, especially back then when 'git pull' was designed,
the world was much simpler.  There was no "fetch && rebase", our
branches did not know what their @{upstream}s were.  In that simpler
world, what you are trying to do would have been:

	git fetch
	# did I get anything worth integrating?
	git merge FETCH_HEAD

That obviously would not work for those with "pull.rebase", and I do
not think it makes much sense to teach "git rebase" the same trick
to read FETCH_HEAD as "git merge" does in the above sequence.

Others may have a better idea, but I do not immediately see any
solution better than inventing a new option to "git pull".

Another and better option that may be harder to arrange is to make
sure that a no-op "git fetch" incurs very low cost.  If you did so,
"git fetch && git pull" would perform just like your "git fetch &&
git pull --no-fetch", and we won't need a new option at all.