[darcs-devel] Branches

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On 05/02/2020 15:26, Benjamin Franksen wrote:

>> I think it'd be
>> ok to just have a --branch parameter to get the non-default/current branch.
> 
> The problem is that for many operations we have two repositories we need
> to name, e.g. for push and pull. So a priori it is not obvious whether
> the argument of --branch means a branch of the local repo or one of the
> remote repo.

I would say that it should only be possible to change the active local
branch. Trying to deal with varying local branches is the source of some
of the UI confusion in git, IMO.

> Even worse, commands like pull may involve more than one remote repo.

That's true.

> So
> I guess we need /some/ sort of notation to denote repo+branch in one
> command line argument. And that means we must define a separator.
> Perhaps a colon ':' would do? Synopsis:
> 
>   http://host/path:branch
>   user at host:path:branch

I think anything will be a bit confusing unless it clearly can't be part
of the URL itself, but that seems ok. Another option that occurs to me
is '@'.

Ganesh