Re: [PATCH 2/2] format-patch: introduce format.defaultTo

From: John Szakmeister <john@szakmeister.net>
Date: Jan 7, 2014, 00:42 UTC
Message-ID: <CAEBDL5W+3zRb1c51N2JfTR2acwvrUi8TpOw-DkjUn_r114mhAA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CALkWK0mQJcFw45uWz08h+gzn6rTdVOdHkUtU3oRTyQ00LbtcbA@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> John Szakmeister wrote:
>> Then where does it get pushed?  Do you always specify where to save your work?
>>
>> FWIW, I think the idea of treating @{u} as the eventual recipient of
>> your changes is good, but then it seems like Git is lacking the
>> "publish my changes to this other branch" concept.
>>
>> Am I missing something?  If there is something other than @{u} to
>> represent this latter concept, I think `git push` should default to
>> that instead.  But, at least with my current knowledge, that doesn't
>> exist--without explicitly saying so--or treating @{u} as that branch.
>> If there's a better way to do this, I'd love to hear it!
>
> That's why we invented remote.pushdefault and branch.*.pushremote. When you say
>
>   $ git push
>
> it automatically goes to the right remote instead of going to the
> place you fetched from. You can read up on how push.default interacts
> with this setting too, although I always recommend push.default =
> current.

This was the piece that I was missing. I remember when remote.pushdefault was added, but questioned its usefulness because it just changes the remote that a branch is pushed to, not necessarily the name. I somehow missed the 'current' option for 'push.default'... which is surprising since I seem to spend an incredible amount of time looking at the git-config man page. I guess it's not a good idea to set 'push.default' to 'upstream' in this triangle workflow then, otherwise the branch name being pushed to will be 'branch.*.merge'. Is that correct? I just want to make sure I understand what's happening here.

Given this new found knowledge, I'm not sure it makes sense for `git status` to show me the status against the upstream vs. the publish location. The latter makes a little more sense to me, though I see the usefulness of either one.

Thanks for taking the time to explain this. I'm going to have to spend some more time with this configuration and see what the sticking points are.

-John