checkout: add advice for ambiguous "checkout <branch>"

As the "checkout" documentation describes:

    If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in
    exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a matching name, treat
    as equivalent to [...] <remote>/<branch.

This is a really useful feature. The problem is that when you add
another remote (e.g. a fork), git won't find a unique branch name
anymore, and will instead print this unhelpful message:

    $ git checkout master
    error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git

Now it will, on my git.git checkout, print:

    $ ./git --exec-path=$PWD checkout master
    error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.
    hint: 'master' matched more than one remote tracking branch.
    hint: We found 26 remotes with a reference that matched. So we fell back
    hint: on trying to resolve the argument as a path, but failed there too!
    hint:
    hint: If you meant to check out a remote tracking branch on, e.g. 'origin',
    hint: you can do so by fully qualifying the name with the --track option:
    hint:
    hint:     git checkout --track origin/<name>

Note that the "error: pathspec[...]" message is still printed. This is
because whatever else checkout may have tried earlier, its final
fallback is to try to resolve the argument as a path. E.g. in this
case:

    $ ./git --exec-path=$PWD checkout master pu
    error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.
    error: pathspec 'pu' did not match any file(s) known to git.

There we don't print the "hint:" implicitly due to earlier logic
around the DWIM fallback. That fallback is only used if it looks like
we have one argument that might be a branch.

I can't think of an intrinsic reason for why we couldn't in some
future change skip printing the "error: pathspec[...]" error. However,
to do so we'd need to pass something down to checkout_paths() to make
it suppress printing an error on its own, and for us to be confident
that we're not silencing cases where those errors are meaningful.

I don't think that's worth it since determining whether that's the
case could easily change due to future changes in the checkout logic.

Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index ab641bf5a9..dfc0413a84 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -344,6 +344,13 @@ advice.*::
 		Advice shown when you used linkgit:git-checkout[1] to
 		move to the detach HEAD state, to instruct how to create
 		a local branch after the fact.
+	checkoutAmbiguousRemoteBranchName::
+		Advice shown when the argument to
+		linkgit:git-checkout[1] ambiguously resolves to a
+		remote tracking branch on more than one remote in
+		situations where an unambiguous argument would have
+		otherwise caused a remote-tracking branch to be
+		checked out.
 	amWorkDir::
 		Advice that shows the location of the patch file when
 		linkgit:git-am[1] fails to apply it.