Re: [ITCH] Specify refspec without remote

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 03:28:12PM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

> > I think the ambiguity is a little more complex than that, because we
> > cannot enumerate the universe of all remotes. Keep in mind that we can
> > take either a configured remote or a URL (or ssh host). So what does:
> >
> >   git push foo:bar
> >
> > mean? Is it pushing "refs/heads/foo" to "refs/heads/bar" on "origin"? Or
> > is it using the default refspecs to push to the "bar" repo on the host
> > "foo" over ssh?
> 
> Wait, why does git-push support pushing to a URL directly?  Shouldn't
> the user be required to create a new remote out of the URL and push to
> that?  What happens to upstream branches if we directly push to a URL?

I do not recall the exact history, but I would not be surprised if git
first learned to push to a URL, and later learned about configured
remotes.  I do not use it that often myself these days, but I find it
occasionally useful for one-off pushes (e.g., pushing a normally private
repo to a temporary publishing point to share with somebody else).

In that case, upstream branches are not touched at all (because we do
not have a configured remote whose fetch refspec we can examine).

-Peff