Why do I need hg update after hg pull while in git I'm doing only git pull
Solution 1
The other answers don't actually answer the question, which is: why don't Git and Mercurial work the same? Is there a philosophical difference?
In Mercurial, pull
is the opposite of push
: it syncs the local repo with a remote repo without touching the working copy. So it's more consistent.
In Git, pull
is a fetch
plus a merge
, or a pull
plus an update
in Mercurial terms. Usually this is what you want. So it's more efficient.
The Distributed Version Control University talk has a slide at the 4-minute mark that clearly demonstrates the way Mercurial works. Michael Ernst's Version control concepts and best practices has a similar diagram (included below):
Solution 2
Because git pull
internally performs git fetch
and git merge
, whereas hg pull
only does what git fetch
does. Just do hg pull -u
instead. See also this command equivalence table.
Git fetch and mercurial pull do the same thing. Mercurial fetch and git pull do the same thing.
Of course Mercurial and Git use different data structures internally, so at some point there is a technical difference in the implementation details. If you really care deeply about it, just compare the documentation for hg pull and git fetch. The Git wording is more technical and verbose, but in the end it is the same.
Solution 3
To get equivalent git functionality enable the fetch Mercurial extension (bundled with Mercurial distributions), see fetch extension. It will execute a hg pull -u
.
Alexander Kulyakhtin
Updated on June 03, 2022Comments
-
Alexander Kulyakhtin about 2 years
In
git
to pull and use the latest changes to my local repository I'm usinggit pull
.In
hg
, I also usehg pull
but it prints thenrun 'hg update' to get a working copy
I do run
hg update
but I wonder why is this difference fromgit
?