Re: tracking branch for a rebase

[Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>]

Junio C Hamano venit, vidit, dixit 07.09.2009 07:05:
> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
>>> Hm, I'd prefer a shorthand for "upstream for this branch", instead of
>>> magic defaults.
>>
>> The more I think about, the more I think that is the right solution.
>> Because magic defaults for "rebase -i" don't help when you want to do
>> "gitk $UPSTREAM..".
>>
>> The previous discussion on the topic seems to be here:
>>
>>   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/113666
>>
>> And apparently you and I both participated in the discussion, which I
>> totally forgot about.
>>
>> Looks like the discussion ended with people liking the idea but not
>> knowing what the specifier should look like. Maybe tightening the ref
>> syntax a bit to allow more extensible "special" refs is a good v1.7.0
>> topic? I dunno.
> 
> At-mark currently is reserved for anything that uses reflog, but we can
> say that it is to specify operations on refs (as opposed to caret and
> tilde are to specify operations on object names).
> 
> It specifies what ref to work on with the operand on its left side (and an
> empty string stands for "HEAD"), and what operation is done to it by what
> is in {} on the right side of it.  This view is quite consistent with the
> following existing uses of the notation:
> 
> 	ref@{number}	-- nth reflog entry
>         ref@{time}	-- ref back then
> 	@{-number}	-- nth branch switching
> 
> So perhaps ref@{upstream}, or any string that is not a number and cannot
> be time, can trigger the magic operation on the ref with ref@{magic}
> syntax?

Even @{} is not taken so far... Alternatively, most people associate '^'
with 'up', just the way we use it for "upwards parentship" ref^ (and
somewhat the way we use it for upwards/backwards tag reference
relationship resolving ref^{type}), so
@^
or
@{^}
would be an option. Read "at upstream" :)

Michael