Re: setting up tracking on push

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Isn't this one confusing with "git branch other_branch origin/master" (I thought --track is the default these days)?

In any case, I find these "branch --retrack" proposals too confusing and probably overengineered.

I need to ask a more fundamental question. Is it really useful for people to be able to re-track arbitrary remote/branch with an existing branch?

The only use case I've heard in this thread and nearby is where you are the one who started the history of the branch, and pushed it into a public repository as a new branch, making the result _the_ most authoritative one. After that, everybody else will be able to have a local branch that tracks the authoritative one with "branch --track frotz origin/frotz", and you will be the only one left unable to do so because you already have that frotz branch.

And for that use case, I find it sensible if we had a way to easily say "This branch hasn't been tracking anything so far (because it is the originator of the history), but now it will give up its authority and start tracking the one it is pushing into", and it would make sense to somehow link that to the invocation of "git push".

    Side note.  I would also accept "It is only one person in the world,
    who can edit .git/config and be done with it; why bother complicate
    the UI for other people" as a valid argument against it, though ;-).

In that "my private branch gave autority to the branch at my public repository" case, it is of course easy to re-clone (or "branch -m" away and then re-fetch) like everybody else, but then you would lose the reflog from the time before the branch went public, so it is not a solution but a poor workaround.

I somehow think it would not make any sense to say "This branch used to track that branch but now it will start tracking this other one". People of course can come up with contrived example to claim it is a useful operation, but in real life, would it really be? "The authoritative repository has moved" is not an example. It would merely be a change in remote.<name>.url. "The upstream renamed the branch" is not an example either. It falls into "Don't do that, then. It will confuse everybody" case.