Re: Tracking parent branches in Git

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 1, 2019, 19:34 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqpnmt5z19.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <DM5PR00MB040845755401A07E5C90251CF1F90@DM5PR00MB0408.namprd00.prod.outlook.com>

Eric Kulcyk <Eric.kulcyk@microsoft.com> writes:

[Overly long lines are not appreciated around here.]

Show 6 quoted lines

> We would like to track parent branches so that creating pull
> requests can automatically determine the correct branch to merge
> against.  I understand that this would require tracking more
> information than is currently available right now in git.  Also,
> it seems that if some cases, it is not possible to determine a
> parent branch, in which case it would just be empty/null.

Do you mean by "parent branch" what people usually call "upstream branch" (i.e. when that branch on the other side gains more commits independent from what you have been working on, then you would want to rebase your work on top of the updated state of that branch on the other side) around here? Perhaps "git help glossary", look for "upstream branch" and start from there? The entry mentions the configuration variables used to keep track of that information, which are described in "git help config", I think.

> If I made a change to track the parent branch for each branch,
> would this feature be accepted/welcomed as part of git, even if it
> off by default?

Regardless of what is being proposed, this is often not a very useful question. Something worth doing for yourself is worth doing whether others also find it useful ;-) And others usually do not have enough information to judge if such a change is welcome until seeing it in a bit more concrete form.

Thanks.