Re: Tracking parent branches in Git

From: Bryan Turner <bturner@atlassian.com>
Date: Jul 2, 2019, 18:52 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGyf7-GhD50Dy0O7JjV4vTyQfFcifyKzeYDS_HtAXy604HxqVQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqef3849v6.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 10:36 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

>
> In this whole thread, I have been wondering if I am missing
> something crucial, but now I am deeply puzzled why after many people
> made comments, nobody raises a question about the "--no-track" thing
> in the early message in the thread.
>
> If you do not add that, i.e.
>
>         $ git checout -t -b bturner-some-bugfix origin/release/5.16
>
> (note that I added '-t' for illustration, but it should be on by
> default when starting from origin/<whatever>), then you'd get in
> your configuration file these recorded:
>
>         $ git config --get-regexp 'branch\.bturner-some-bugfix\..*'
>         branch.bturner-some-bugfix.remote origin
>         branch.bturner-some-bugfix.merge refs/heads/release/5.16
>
> You created 'bturner-some-bugfix' branch out of the 'release/5.16'
> branch taken from the remote whose name is 'origin'.
>
> Is that different from the answer to the question being sought?
> What am I missing???

Sorry, I should have clarified my "--no-track" in my original message when I provided the example. I did "--no-track" because if I push "bturner-some-bugfix" to a server, I'm likely going to do something like "git push -u origin bturner-some-bugfix" so that my local "bturner-some-bugfix" branch will track the remote version of itself. At that point, the remote-tracking information would change from "release/5.16" to "bturner-some-bugfix" (without any sort of warning, for whatever that's worth), effectively "losing" the ancestry.

The other issue is that my local remote-tracking information doesn't help the server I'm talking to; it's not shareable. Assuming I could use remote-tracking to track ancestry, there's still no way to communicate that to the server so that it could know, when I go to create a pull request for "bturner-some-bugfix", that it's tracking "release/5.16" in my local repository.

I could certainly be misunderstanding the request, but I think it's asking for something less ephemeral--and more shareable--than remote-tracking, and it seems logical to want to be able to retain ancestry while still using remote-tracking setup such that local branches still track the remote version of themselves, rather than some other (albeit related) branch.

Best regards, Bryan Turner