Re: [RFC/PATCH] format-patch: introduce branch.*.forkedFrom

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 02:00:44AM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 1:59 AM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> > A very common workflow for preparing patches involves working off a
> > topic branch and generating patches against 'master' to send off to the
> > maintainer. However, a plain
> >
> >   $ git format-patch -o outgoing
> >
> > is a no-op on a topic branch, and the user has to remember to specify
> > 'master' explicitly everytime. This problem is not unique to
> > format-patch; even a
> >
> >   $ git rebase -i
> >
> > is a no-op because the branch to rebase against isn't specified.
> >
> > To tackle this problem, introduce branch.*.forkedFrom which can specify
> > the parent branch of a topic branch. Future patches will build
> > functionality around this new configuration variable.
> >
> > Cc: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
> > Cc: Junio C Hamano <gister@pobox.com>
> > Signed-off-by: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>

I have not carefully read some of the later bits of the discussion from
last night / this morning, so maybe I am missing something, but this
seems backwards to me from what Junio and I were discussing earlier.

The point was that the meaning of "@{upstream}" (and "branch.*.merge")
is _already_ "forked-from", and "push -u" and "push.default=upstream"
are the odd men out. If we are going to add an option to distinguish the
two branch relationships:

  1. Where you forked from

  2. Where you push to

we should leave @{upstream} as (1), and add a new option to represent
(2). Not the other way around.

Am I missing something?

-Peff