Re: [RFC PATCH] git push: Push nothing if no refspecs are given or configured

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 6, 2009, 17:17 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr61ash8o.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <m3r61aisdo.fsf@localhost.localdomain>

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> ...
>> Speaking of which, Steffen (who cannot reply right now, since he is AFK 
>> for a while) had a patch to install "remote.<branch>.push = HEAD" with 
>> clone and remote.  Would that be better?
>
> Errr... I thought that "remote.<remotename>.push = HEAD" works?
>
> But note that "remote.<name>.push = HEAD" (push current branch only)
> and "remote.<name>.push = :" (push matching branches, i.e. curent
> behavior) works only if you have remote configured... "git push <URL>"
> won't be affected, and people (probably) would want to either have
> 'nothing' as default, or/and be able to configure it to nothing,
> current, or matching (at least).

When you and Dscho contradict with each other, I seem to end up agreeing with Dscho most of the time, but for this particular one, I completely agree with you.

I personally think Finn's suggested list is overengineered, and we should start with only three: "nothing", "current" (aka HEAD), and "matching". It is Ok to have a separate discussion to figure out what other default behaviours are desireable, but I think that should come after the dust settled from the transition, and more importantly, I think the other kinds of fine-tuned behaviour needs to be per-remote, and is not something the repository (or user) wide default push.default can cover.

In addition to your counterargument, clone to set up remote.*.push is introducing an inconsistency between existing and new repositories until the default is changed for everybody, and the recent trend is to avoid that kind of inconsistency. Steffen's patch _could_ use push.default to infer what kind of remote.*.push to set up when adding a remote (or when cloning, if you take push.default from $HOME/.gitconfig), but at that point it becomes a redundant information.