Tracking of local branches

Hi there,

me again. In connection with Dscho's recent patch which rang the bell on tracked branches I noticed that local branches are treated somewhat inconsistently by git. There are 2 ways to fix it, and I ask you for your input on which one to choose.

First of all: The documentation seems to imply that it's okay to follow local branches, i.e. to have tracked local branches. Specifically, the option --track allows setting up tracking info (branch.foo.merge) in cases where it's not set up automatically (it is when you branch off a remote tracking branch).

If it's not OK to say "git checkout -b newbranch --track local" when local is a local branch you can stop reading here and tell me to stop writing...

Now, assuming it's okay to have a local branch being tracked, the current situation is:

git fetch/pull is okay (respects the setting) git status/checkout/rev-parse BEL is not (acts as if there is no tracking info)

I think I have tracked it down (pun intended) to the fact that one sort of commands looks at the struct member branch->merge, the other at branch->merge_name. The latter is set for branches which follow something, the former only for followers of remote branches.

I semi-successfully messed around in remote.c (format_tracking_info(), stat_tracking_info()) to make it use branch->merge_name rather than branch->merge. This makes "git status" work as expected ("Your branch is... severely screwed.") for tracked local branches. (It's messed up for remote ones but hey it was a first shot; merge[0]->dst is really needed here I guess.)

Now I could go after sha1_name.c and do the same,

OR

make it so that all branches have their merge member set up, uhm. Any possible side effects?

What do you think? Michael