Subject: Re: Using the --track option when creating a branch

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:25:40 +0100

Bill Lear wrote:
> On Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 06:04:54 (-0600) Bill Lear writes:
>> On Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 22:12:18 (-0700) Sam Vilain writes:
>>> On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 09:23 -0600, Bill Lear wrote:
>>>> We use git in a way that makes it desirable for us to only push/pull
>>>> to the same remote branch.  So, if I'm in branch X, I want 'git push'
>>>> to push to origin/X, and 'git pull' to fetch into origin/X and then
>>>> merge into X from origin/X.
>>>>
>>>> In other words, we want git push/pull to behave in branches other than
>>>> master the same way it does when in master.
>>>>
>>>> I have discovered the '--track' option when creating a local branch,
>>>> and this appears to me to be the thing that gives us the desired
>>>> behavior.
>>> As things currently stand this is not achievable behaviour.  The
>>> behaviour of 'git push' is to push all matching refs.  If you are lucky
>>> this is what you intended, but it also pushes any changes to *other*
>>> branches that you have made.
>>>
>>> I have tabled a change proposal to make it work as you suggest in a
>>> separate thread.
>> Ok, now I'm confused.  The ONLY thing I want to prevent is the
>> "crossing of streams" issue.  If I am on branch X and issue 'git
>> push', I want X, and ONLY X, to be pushed to the remote repository's X
>> branch --- I don't care if other branches are pushed to their
>> respective remote branches, as long as they don't get merged to X.
> 
> Oh, and also the same thing for 'git pull' --- sorry to leave that out.
> 

This particular bikeshed was painted a long time ago, with the consensus
going in favour of "git push" pushing all *matching* refspecs.

To convince people, I think you need to either come up with arguments
nullifying all the arguments *for* pushing all matching refspecs along
with patches to make the default configurable, with your preferred way
as a default, and a nifty enough shorthand for pushing/fetching all
matching refspecs. For preference, they should be at least 3 separate
patches.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231