Re: Obscure error/warning/information message from git pull

[Tassilo Horn]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Alan,

> I have two repositories in directories named .../master and
> .../emacs-24, the second having been cloned from the first.

I'm no git super-expert, but using

  git clone address@hidden:/srv/git/emacs.git

I got a clone of the official repo containing all branches with the
master branch being current.  Then I did

  cd emacs
  git checkout emacs-24
  cd ..
  git clone emacs emacs-24

which gave me a new directory emacs-24 that automatically tracks the
emacs-24 branch so that I can pull/push in there.  However, now the
origin remote is the directory ../emacs, not savannah, so pulling/
pushing works with that, not upstream on savannah.  So I changed
emacs-24/.git/config from

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
[core]
        repositoryformatversion = 0
        filemode = true
        bare = false
        logallrefupdates = true
[remote "origin"]
        url = /home/horn/Repos/el/emacs
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "emacs-24"]
        remote = origin
        merge = refs/heads/emacs-24
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

to

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
[core]
        repositoryformatversion = 0
        filemode = true
        bare = false
        logallrefupdates = true
[remote "origin"]
        url = address@hidden:/srv/git/emacs.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "emacs-24"]
        remote = origin
        merge = refs/heads/emacs-24
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Well, the result was that another "git pull" downloaded quite some
stuff, so now I also have all branches available also in emacs-24.  I
think I should have set the fetch ref-spec to emacs-24 instead of *
above...  Who knows.  But still my emacs-24 dir is only 364M whereas the
emacs dir I cloned from savannah is 619M.

Anyway, now I did

  cd ../emacs
  git checkout master

so that I have the master branch in emacs/ and the emacs-24 branch in
emacs-24/.  Pulling works in both, pushing untested so far (but I'm
pretty sure it'll do the trick).

> glossary), but not what "the remote" means (is it referring to the
> .../master repository, or is it something within .../emacs-24?).

The remotes are the servers you are pulling/pushing with.  The origin
remote is the one you initially cloned from, i.e., savannah.  It can
also be a directory if you did "git clone path/to/emacs
path/to/emacs-foo".

> What about "but no such ref was fetched"?  Fetched from where?  From
> the .../master repository, perhaps?

I guess your problem is that "git clone dir1 dir2" doesn't create a full
copy of all branches but only the branch that was current in dir1 which
is probably master in your case.  That's why I've switched to emacs-24
before cloning in my receipe above.

> Then I wanted to list only those those commits in the emacs-24 branch.
> Ha!  "git help log" was of no help.  It goes into a man page, and
> there is nothing helpful there thus to restrict the display.  There
> appears not to be an option such as "-b emacs-24".  There is a
> "--branches" option, but what that is supposed to do is completely
> opaque to me.  How do I do what I want, here?

Probably, "git checkout emacs-24 && git log".

HTH,
Tassilo