Re: Using the --track option when creating a branch

["Santi Béjar" <santi@agolina.net>]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 1:04 PM, Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 22:12:18 (-0700) Sam Vilain writes:
>>On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 09:23 -0600, Bill Lear wrote:
>>> We use git in a way that makes it desirable for us to only push/pull
>>> to the same remote branch.  So, if I'm in branch X, I want 'git push'
>>> to push to origin/X, and 'git pull' to fetch into origin/X and then
>>> merge into X from origin/X.
>>>
>>> In other words, we want git push/pull to behave in branches other than
>>> master the same way it does when in master.
>>>
>>> I have discovered the '--track' option when creating a local branch,
>>> and this appears to me to be the thing that gives us the desired
>>> behavior.
>>
>>As things currently stand this is not achievable behaviour.  The
>>behaviour of 'git push' is to push all matching refs.  If you are lucky
>>this is what you intended, but it also pushes any changes to *other*
>>branches that you have made.
>>
>>I have tabled a change proposal to make it work as you suggest in a
>>separate thread.
>
> Ok, now I'm confused.  The ONLY thing I want to prevent is the
> "crossing of streams" issue.  If I am on branch X and issue 'git
> push', I want X, and ONLY X, to be pushed to the remote repository's X
> branch --- I don't care if other branches are pushed to their
> respective remote branches, as long as they don't get merged to X.

No branches will get merged in a push.

>
> So, are you saying that Santi was incorrect, and that in fact
> the push will result in a merge of the branches?

Sorry, I was (partly) incorrect because I was only talking about pull.
For push you can add a "push = HEAD" config to the remote and then the
"git push" will only push the current branch (with the corresponding
matching remote branch).

$ git config remote.origin.push HEAD

Strictly speaking when you push (with the default config or with the
above trick) you push matching branches (it doesn't matter what is the
branch.<remote>.merge). Currently there is no way to say "push to the
corresponding tracking branch"

Still I think this will work as you want (as long as your local and
remote branch have the same name):

$ git clone $url
$ cd path
$ git config remote.origin.push HEAD
$ git checkout -b branch origin/branch
$ work, commit,...
$ git push

HTH,
Santi