Re: [RFC] New kind of upstream branch: base branch

["Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org>]

From: "Felipe Contreras" <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 9:34 PM
> Hi,
>
> I've been using Git from the start, but only lately have I forced
> myself to configure upstream branches for all my branches, and I've
> found a few things more convenient, but others completely contrary to
> what I expected.
>
> Inconvenient:
>
> Before, I used to do 'git fetch' to simply fetch from 'origin', but
> now, it depends on where 'upstream' is set to.
>
> Convinient:
>
> Now, I can just do 'git rebase --interactive' and I don't have to
> specify the starting point, which is particularily useful when there's
> a lot of branches one depending on another.
>
> I think I'm using 'upstream' for something it was not intended to, and
> I think the current 'upstream' behavior should be split into
> 'upstream' and 'base'.
>
> == base ==
>
> The 'base' branch will be set each time you create a branch from 
> another;
> 'git checkout -b foobar master' sets 'master' as the 'base' of 
> 'foobar'.
>
> Then you can do 'git rebase foobar@{base}' or simply 'git rebase', and
> Git will pick the right branch to rebase unto, even if you have no
> 'upstream'
> configured.
>
> This way 'git fetch' will keep picking 'origin', and other commands
> that make use of 'upstream' would be undisturbed.
>
> If both 'base' and 'upstream' are defined, I think 'git rebase' should
> use 'base', but since that would break old behavior, perhaps there
> should be a configuration variable to enable a different behavior.
>
> I already started writting the patches, and although tedious, I think
> they they'll be rather straightforward, but I thought it would be best
> to hear some opinions first.
>
> What do you think?
>
> -- 
> Felipe Contreras
---
Sound a reasonable idea. On some patches I was working on I had to 
[chose to] add a tag for the base which made it easier to rebase later.

The other point is that I had already noted that the glossary doesn't 
include the many "base" terms in use that aren't always well understood.

Philip Oakley