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

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 6, 2014, 22:47 UTC
Message-ID: <CALkWK0=Km+a7NBm9ki5MN=R28HkzUZRqnBKcpuPZDrQKdsBesg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqha9ghhrw.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

Junio C Hamano wrote:.

Show 10 quoted lines

> As I said in the different subthread, I am not convinced that you
> would need the complexity of branch.*.forkedFrom.  If you set your
> "upstream" to the true upstream (not your publishing point), and
> have "remote.pushdefault"set to 'publish', you can expect
>
>         git push
>
> to do the right thing, and then always say
>
>         git show-branch publish/topic topic

I think it's highly sub-optimal to have a local-branch @{u} for several reasons; the prompt is almost useless in this case, and it will always show your forked-branch ahead of 'master' (assuming that 'master' doesn't update itself in the duration of your development). While doing respins, the prompt doesn't aid you in any way. Besides, on several occasions, I found myself working on the same forked-branch from two different machines; then the publish-point isn't necessarily always a publish-point: it's just another "upstream" for the branch. The point of a special branch.*.forkedFrom is that you can always show the "master..@" information in the prompt ignoring divergences; after all, a divergence simply means that you need to rebase onto the latest 'master' ('master' is never going to get a non-ff update anyway).

So, instead of crippling the functionality around the publish-point, let's build minimal required functionality around branch.*.forkedFrom. I'd love a prompt like:

  branch-forkedfrom<>5*:~/src/git$

Clearly, branch-forkedfrom has diverged from my publish-point (I'm probably doing a respin), and has 5 commits (it's 5 commits ahead of 'master' ignoring divergences).

> to see where your last published branch is relative to what you
> have, no?  Mapping "topic@{publish}" to "refs/remotes/publish/topic"
> (or when you have 'topic' checked out, mapping "@{publish}" to it)
> is a trivial but is a separate usefulness, I would guess.

I think a @{publish} is needed for when branch.*.remote is different from remote.pushDefault. Like I said earlier, it's probably too much information to give to the user: divergences with respect to two remotes. So, we'll hold it off until someone finds a usecase for it.