From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:51:13 GMT
Subject: Re: [BUG] inconsistent behavior with --set-upstream vs --set-upstream-to
Message-ID: <20130402175113.GD24698@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <A4C40BCB-85DD-4BCB-8BF0-79A75DE73211@gmail.com>

On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 10:30:35AM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:

> I push the branch to origin/ and then things tend to work, but since I
> obviously had been doing things wrong what's the correct order of
> operations for creating a branch and setting the upstream
> appropriately?

Once you have pushed it, the push creates the refs/remotes/origin/foo
tracking branch automatically. You are then free to reference it
wherever you like, including in set-upstream-to. However, you can also
just ask push to do it for you with "--set-upstream" or "-u". So the
workflow is something like:

  $ git checkout -b my-topic
  $ hack hack hack
  $ git commit -m "looking good, time to publish"
  $ git push -u origin HEAD

> PS I love git as a tool, but I really wish the workflows were simpler
> or more straightforward, and error messages were clearer. It seems
> like this would help prevent usage errors like this..

Things slowly improve as people make suggestions. I think the thing that
might have helped here is better advice when "set-upstream-to" is
pointed to a ref that does not exist.

Patches coming in a minute.

-Peff