Re: tracking branch for a rebase

Pete Wyckoff venit, vidit, dixit 04.09.2009 15:54:

I received an interesting question today.

If "git pull" knows what remote tracking brach to pull from,
why doesn't "git rebase" automatically know I want to rebase
on top of my remote tracking branch?

He had done a "git remote update", reviewed the changes, and now
wants to rebase his changes on top of the new upstream.

I told him about git pull --rebase, and branch.name.rebase,
but didn't have an easy answer to the "what is my remote tracking
branch" question in this case.

I guess he knows that branch if he reviewed it... More seriously,

git for-each-ref --format='%(upstream)' refs/heads/hisbranch

will return the upstream of hisbranch.

All the information is in git config branch.name.{remote,merge},
but I can't find anything that just answers that question.  Nor
did I have a good answer for why "git rebase" doesn't just default
to rebasing the current branch on top of the tracking branch.

Maybe because nobody has cared. Doing a "git pull --rebase" is not
equivalent (it may fetch more refs), but close enough for many people.

There was an initiative by Dscho a while ago to introduce a shortcut for
the upstream, which was dwarfed by the lack reserved characters for
refnames. Maybe 1.7 time frame would be a good time to change this?

Making this the default for rebase without arguments may meet some
objections (oh no, I didn't mean to rebase), but I guess it's worth trying.

Michael