Subject: Re: Do most people feel tracking branches useful?

From: Liu Yubao <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:58:05 +0800

Miles Bader wrote:
> Liu Yubao <[email-masked]> writes:
>> do most people feel tracking branches useful?
> 
> Extremely useful.  I usually keep local branches closely synchronized
> with a remote "central" version, and tracking branches make the frequent
> push/pull much more convenient.
> 
In my work flow, I don't keep changes in local branch for long time,
I rebase it regularly and push them to central branch or discard them
if the upstream rejects.

You are right, I realize tracking branches is useful for people who keeps
local changes for long time and track the upstream branch at the same time.

But I guess an auto-rebasing policy is more sensible than auto-merging policy
because I won't get many useless "Merge branch 'xxx' of ..." messages in the
history.

Another problem about tracking branch is `git pull` won't merge tracking branch
with remote branch when the current branch isn't tracking branch, it warns me
"You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you ....". It's not
convenient to checkout tracking branch and execute `git pull` then switch back
to my working branch.