Question

I need to fetch everything from a few different, distinct repositories (all remote branches and all changes to those branches). I tried git pull --all but for some reason, I get the following message:

There are no candidates for merging among the refs that you just fetched.
Generally this means that you provided a wildcard refspec which had no
matches on the remote end.

So how would I go about ensuring that I get all the changes from a repository (without knowing what branches are on the other end, if possible)?

All help is appreciated and thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Generally speaking — that’s a really, really bad idea. Don’t do that. “All remote branches” will often include work-in-progress code, abandoned code, conflicting implementations of the same feature, etc. Trying to merge them all into your local tree is a recipe for disaster.

Now, if you really wanted to do the very silly thing you suggested, you could do it something like thus:

git fetch remote_source
git merge $(git branch -r | grep remote_source)

Now, if all you really want to do is have a local copy of all remote changes, without trying to merge them into your tree, then you don’t need to do a pull or merge at all; git fetch remote_source does it all for you. Sure, it doesn’t create local branches mapped to the remotes — but it does pull down the remote branches, and you can create local ones when and as you need them, with no further communication with the remote source required.

---

Given further problem description in the comments, it sounds like what you really want is to push all branches from your old remote to a new remote, not to merge them into a single tree. To do this, you’d probably want something like the following:

args=()
for remote_branch in $(git branch -r | grep OLD_REMOTE/); do
  branch_name=${remote_branch#*/}
  args+=( "${remote_branch}:${branch_name}" )
done
git push NEW_REMOTE "${args[@]}"