The Question
Simple Case
More Complex Case
Is This Working?
The Question
I saw a poll pop up in my Mastodon feed:
And my brain snagged on it. Because it reminded me that I developed some preferences, built them into aliases, and then shoved them comfortably below the level of conscious thought. And hey, that hasn’t caused a problem for me so far! It’s still good to re-evaluate these things from time to time though. So when I need to grab some upstream changes with git, what do I do?
Note: I don’t intend this as expert guidance – I am neither expert nor guide.
Simple Case
Situation: My active local branch is behind its upstream counterpart.
I…
Run git f (an alias which in my head means “freshen up”).
Under the covers, this runs a git pull and I’m up to date. Yay!
More Complex Case
Situation: I’m working on a branch and want to pull updates in from another branch (typically main).
I…
Run git f main.
Under the covers, this runs a git fetch command that updates my local main branch from its upstream remote, but leaves my current branch alone.
Then depending on the situation, I might:
git merge main (perhaps I’m making minor maintainer edits to a community pull request)
git rebase main (it’s my own junk and I just want to be updated)
git rebase -i main (I’ve got some fine-tuning to do)
Is This Working?
I haven’t really interrogated my instincts in a while, so does this flow still work for me?
Yeah, I think so. It tucks most of my “get me up to date” behavior behind a single alias, and deliberately leaves me to make a judgement call in cases where the next step is less certain.
For the record, here’s the full picture of what git f does:
set -euxo pipefail
if [[ -z “${1:-}“ ]]; then
git pull -v
else
git rev-parse –abbrev-ref “${1}“@{upstream} |
awk ‘{split ($0,ref,”/”); system(“git fetch -v –prune ” ref[1] ” ” ref[2] “:” ref[2]); }’
fi
That else clause feels a bit weird. But it means when I run git f main:
That git rev-parse bit finds whichever remote is upstream of main. Let’s say that’s called origin.
Something like git fetch origin main:main updates my local main branch, but leaves my active branch alone.
–prune does a bit of tidying while we’re at it, removing local branches that were tracking remote branches that no longer exist
There’s undoubtedly a better/smarter way to handle this workflow, express it in bash, or both. Suggestions welcome in the comments!
