Re: Default remote branch for local branch

From: Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
Date: Apr 3, 2006, 10:03 UTC
Message-ID: <4430F2E5.1030106@op5.se>
In-Reply-To: <200604031138.29227.Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de>

Josef Weidendorfer wrote:

Show 31 quoted lines

> On Monday 03 April 2006 09:56, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 
>>Josef Weidendorfer wrote:
>>
>>>Optionally, branching <new> off from <old> could add <new> as
>>>topic branch of <old>: Thus, if you are on <old> and do git-pull,
>>>you get <new> merged in.
>>>
>>
>>This is clearly insane. If I'm on <old> and want to sync with my 
>>upstream source that would be impossible without explicitly telling it 
>>*not* to merge with <new>. Iow, this change would (possibly) simplify 
>>for the one repo maintainer, but make things harder for the 30-odd 
>>developers.
> 
> 
> Yes.
> Therefore I put "optionally" above. But you are right, mixing up
> "merge upstream" and "merge downstream" into one config option is insane.
> 
> Some idea independent but related:
> I still think it is a better UI of a porcelain to try to note metainfo
> automatically, ie. storing somewhere that we branched one off another.
> What about adding "branch.topic" config option for this?
> "git-branch -t newtopic"/"git-checkout -b newtopic -t"
> would create a new topic branch, which is remembered in "branch.topic",
> and "git-pull -t" merges these topic branches?
> To specify that a remote branch is a topic branch of a given local
> branch (to be pulled into with "git-pull -t"), we could add
> "git-branch --add-topic <refspec>|<remoteURL>".
>

Sorry, but I still don't see the use of it. Usually, some topics mature faster than others, meaning I'd still have to do the old "git pull . this and that", leaving "the-other-one" to soak a bit longer. What you're suggesting would make the odd case easier while adding nothing for the normal flow.

For archeological purposes it might make some sense to record what the branch was named that you forked from, but to me it's more interesting to see which state the code was in when the code forked, and this is discernable by the merge-base command.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
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