Re: push.default: current vs upstream

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 12, 2012, 15:04 UTC
Message-ID: <7viph5gfet.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120412071150.GB31122@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Sat, Apr 07, 2012 at 09:40:26AM +0100, Andrew Sayers wrote:
>
>> On a slight aside, should we add @{downstream} to describe the opposite
>> of @{upstream}?  Seeing that around the place would give intermediate
>> users a clue about why pull and push aren't as related as they think,
>> and would be useful here and there in code (e.g. __git_ps1 could show a
>> better bash prompt with GIT_PS1_SHOWUPSTREAM).
>
> Maybe. I don't really see how it is useful, but maybe you want to flesh
> our your proposal with some examples? I do not use __git_ps1, so I'm not
> sure what you want to improve there.

I took "downstream" as an opposite of "upstream".

The "upstream" of your branch is often (but not always) a remote tracking branch, and because it makes sense to only have zero or one (but not more) branch.$name.merge, "$name@{upstream}" would mean something. There is an N-to-1 mapping from branches to their upstreams.

Given a remote tracking branch $name, (or if you use "upstream" to fork your branch off of another of your branches, it could be a local branch), there can be many branches that call it an "upstream", which means that the notation "$name@{downstream}" cannot even map to a single object name or a refname; it is a 1-to-N mapping.

So I thought this was a joke and not a serious proposal.