Comments on: git: fetch and merge, don’t pull

By: Tyler Gillispie

Tyler Gillispie — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:39:00 +0000

Great article. I’m new to Git. This has helped me clarify some steps required for properly merging between origin and local branches and the difference between the branches. Props.

By: Monica Anderson

Monica Anderson — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:24:54 +0000

After a couple years of working with git this still taught me a lot of really important stuff – an excellent post at the “beyond-the-basics” level git use. Probably best one on the internet at that level. Thank you. And no, it’s not too long. Feel free to write a sequel. :-)

By: jeyanth kumar

jeyanth kumar — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:52:40 +0000

heya mark… Awesome post.. :) thanks for the info will read rest of your git posts..:)

By: mark

mark — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:03:33 +0000

Hi Mukundan. I’m afraid this isn’t a good place to ask general git questions of that kind. I would suggest that you go to Stack Overflow http://stackoverflow.com and write a question that phrases your problem as clearly as possible. I think you’ll find that if your question about git is clear then you’ll get an answer very fast.

By: Mukundan

Mukundan — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:54:22 +0000

Hey Mark,
I read your article it just had that piece of info im looking for . I hope so :) .So i just thought of confirming this with you.
Here is my issue:
I forgot to do a git pull before i started working on the local resource.In End of the day i made a lot of changes and when i tried to commmit and push the changes , it dint work.It was then i realised a couple of changes were made in the online repository by my collegues. Since im new to GITHUb i found the git bash scary. Could you tel me how i could decide which files from which source is to be retained and which should be overwritten thru git gui,.. please help me buddy :)

By: pleintious

pleintious — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:43:16 +0000

That is too out.

By: Bill Rosner

Bill Rosner — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:38:14 +0000

Great article, TYVM!

By: Roy Badami

Roy Badami — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:26:49 +0000

Oh, and I don’t think (although I haven’t used it) that “hg pull -u” will ever perform a merge unless there are any uncommitted changes in the working directory – everything I can see just says it’s equivalient to “hg pull; hg update” which will just pull changes in, and then update the working copy to the latest revision in the current branch.

But whoa!, I didn’t know about hg fetch. Talk about implicit, not only does it implicitly merge, it even implicitly commits the results of the merge. (Ok, I imagine you’ll get prompted for a commit message, so you’re unlikely to do so by accident, but still… IMHO something as wacky as fetch should be an Hg extension so you have to explicitly enable it….)

roy

By: Roy Badami

Roy Badami — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:13:30 +0000

Oh, Hi Mark, didn’t realise it was you!

I’m probably being unfair in my complaint about implicit merges – all source code control systems implicitly merge into the working copy all the time.

But in source code control systems I have some familiarity with (SVN, a little Hg) the only merges that I can think of that happen without typing the command ‘merge’ happen when there are uncommitted changes in the working copy, and an operation is performed that updates the working copy (and hence has to merge those changes in). And AIUI that’s not what we’re talking about here.

There’s also something odd going on with command naming – why is it that a pull is not the opposite of a push? To have push and fetch be the actual direct counterparts, with pull being something different, is… unnaturual to say the least…

roy

By: mark

mark — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:09:24 +0000

Hi Roy – it’s nice to hear from you. You’re quite right about the terminology – I’ve got a blog post in mind about the most confusing terms in git, e.g. the three different senses of “track” – aargh!)

I hadn’t realized this one before, not being familiar with Mercurial, but, indeed, it seems that “hg pull” is closest to “git fetch”, while “hg pull -u” (or “hg fetch” – aargh again!) is closest to “git pull”.

With regard to explicit / implicit, I dunno. I’d probably argue that using “git pull” is to explicitly request a merge as well as a fetch, since the summary in its man page says “Fetch from and merge with another repository or a local branch” (my emphasis). However, part of the point of this blog post is that a lot of newcomers to git don’t realize that you can do “git fetch” instead of “git pull” to avoid the automatic merge.

The thing that I might change in your definition of a merge to make it more “git worldview” is that (usually) merges in git are between two commits (and thus the state of two complete source code trees) rather than a file-by-file operation. (I say “usually” because you can merge between more than two commits (octopus merges), there are subtree merges, etc. etc.)