Can a git refspec include multiple wildcards?

Question

Running git ls-remote origin on a repo I have access to, I see branches of the following form, using git namespaces .

refs/namespaces/share/refs/namespaces/<username>/refs/heads/<branch-name>

I'd like to map these to refs/remotes/<username>/<branch-name> .

This github help page gives an example of how to solve a simpler version of this problem, by adding this to the .git/config :

[remote "origin"]
    fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/origin/pr/*

I can make things work for my case with:

[remote "origin"]
    fetch = +refs/namespaces/share/refs/namespaces/USER1/refs/heads/<branch-name>:refs/remotes/origin/USER1/*
    fetch = +refs/namespaces/share/refs/namespaces/USER2/refs/heads/<branch-name>:refs/remotes/origin/USER2/*
    # etc

But this requires me to know all the usernames ahead of time. Unfortunately, using two * s doesn't work:

[remote "origin"]
    fetch = +refs/namespaces/share/refs/namespaces/*/refs/heads/<branch-name>:refs/remotes/origin/*/*

Is there way of achieving this remapping?

Answer 1

No—or more precisely, not short of writing a program to write a series of fetch = lines.

You could write such a program using a sort of meta-configuration (stored in .git/config or somewhere else, it does not really matter at this level). The program would run git ls-remote on the remote, compute the appropriate fetch = lines, and update .git/config to contain them.

If you name this program, say, git-synchrofetch (this name is meant to harken back to synchromesh ), you could have it invoke git fetch after updating .git/config . Then instead of git fetch origin you might run git synchrofetch origin , to update your default fetches and then fetch.

(Note that the program could also just invoke git fetch directly with a full set of refspecs, but the idea here would be to let most of the other Git code operate as normal and only do a resynchronization when you think the set of user names has changed.)