Re: [Survey] Signed push

[Andy Lutomirski <luto@MIT.EDU>]

On 09/13/2011 09:45 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> An alternative that I am considering is to let the requester say this
> instead:
> 
>     are available in the git repository at:
>       git://git.kernel.org/pub/flobar.git/ 5738c9c21e53356ab5020912116e7f82fd2d428f
> 
> without adding the extra line.
> 
> That is, to allow fetching the history up to an explicitly named commit
> object. This would only involve a change to fetch-pack at the receiving
> end; just match the commit object name given from the command line against
> the ls-remote response and ask upload-pack to give the history leading to
> it. The released versions of Git already will happily oblige, as long as
> the commit object named in the request message still sits at the tip of
> the intended branch.

I would love this feature on the pull/fetch interface, but for a
completely different reason.  Sometimes I want to pull a particular
object (usually a commit, but sometimes just a tree or blob) from
*myself*, and having to stick it on a branch is annoying.

One use-case is when applying a patch in git's extended format.  If I
know where it came from, I ought to be able to pull the blobs it depends
on to enable three-way merge.  I think that this is essentially
impossible remotely right now.

Of course, merging with the result of the pull will result in terrible
automatically-generated messages, but it's easy to fix that up manually.

This is one thing that I think Mercurial handles better than git.  (And
apologies for the noise if I've missed a way to do this with current
git.  I've looked, but maybe I missed some magic way to do this.)

--Andy