Git Weirdness

March 16, 2009 at 18:29

So I have a git repo on my machine at home, that’s cloned from a repo on git.xfce.org. I was doing some work in it the other day – in a private branch, not published to git.xfce.org – and I wanted to continue working on the private branch from another machine. But… it won’t work. Let’s say ‘machine1’ has the repo with the private branch, and ‘machine2’ is where I want to work today.

So, on machine2, I cloned from the master repo on git.xfce.org:

[brian@machine2 src $] git clone git@git.xfce.org:kelnos/airconfig
[... stuff happens...]
[brian@machine2 src $] cd airconfig
[brian@machine2 airconfig $] git branch -a
* master
  origin/master
  origin/pre-hal

Ok, cool, that’s what I expect. So I ssh over to machine1 (the one I eventually want to pull from), and I check out my list of branches there:

[brian@machine1 airconfig $] git branch -a
  advanced-ip-settings
  master
* nm-frontend
  notification-rework
  reconnect
  origin/master
  origin/pre-hal

Ok, cool. the ‘nm-frontend’ branch is the one I want to pull to machine2. So on machine2, I do this:

[brian@machine2 airconfig $] git remote add machine1 machine1:src/airconfig
[brian@machine2 airconfig $] git pull machine1 nm-frontend
fatal: Couldn't find remote ref nm-frontend
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Uh… what? Do I have the wrong syntax? Ok, let me just try to pull everything from the remote:

[brian@machine2 airconfig $] git pull machine1
remote: Counting objects: 1085, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (301/301), done.
remote: Total 1085 (delta 774), reused 1085 (delta 774)
Receiving objects: 100% (1085/1085), 323.43 KiB | 14 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (774/774), done.
From machine1:src/airconfig
 * [new branch]      advanced-ip-settings -> machine1/advanced-ip-settings
 * [new branch]      master     -> machine1/master
 * [new branch]      pre-hal    -> machine1/pre-hal

And then at the bottom it prints out a message about not knowing which local branches to merge stuff into. That’s fine, no big deal. But… how come it pulled 3 of my local branches on machine1, but left off 2 of them (‘notification-rework’ and ‘nm-frontend’). No combination of src:dest refspecs seem to do the trick. Pulling one of the 3 branches it seems to like using the syntax I used above seems to work fine, but it can’t see the one I want. What am I doing wrong…?