Re: Tracking parent branches in Git

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 2, 2019, 17:36 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqef3849v6.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <77a2b000-f1dc-6f3e-54db-abd227ce6163@iee.org>

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

>> I suspect the question is in regards to "What branch did I create
>> my local branch from?", especially given the pull request
>> reference.
>>
>> In other words, when I locally do:
>> git checkout --no-track -b bturner-some-bugfix origin/release/5.16
>>
>> release/5.16 is the "parent branch" of my bugfix branch...
>> ...
> From the Git side, maybe one could simply populate the branch
> description with the commit oid and branched-from name at the time of
> branch creation (no doubt set as a core.option).
> The field is already there and almost never used - there's no easy way
> (via git command) to populate the description anyway. Plus its a local
> field, keeping Git distributed.

I do not think you want branch.description to get mixed-up in this.

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???