Re: [RFC/PATCH] Introduce remote.pushdefault

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 06:00:08AM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

quoted

quoted

+remote.pushdefault::
+     The remote to push to by default.  Overrides the
+     branch-specific configuration `branch.<name>.remote`.

It feels unexpected to see "I may have said while on this branch I
push there and on that branch I push somewhere else, but no, with
this single configuration I'm invalidating all these previous
statements, and all pushes go to this new place".

Shouldn't the default be the default that is to be overridden by
other configuration that is more specific?  That is, "I would
normally push to this remote and unless I say otherwise that is all
I have to say, but for this particular branch, I push to somehwere
else".

I'm a little confused as to where this configuration variable will be
useful.  On a fresh clone from Github, I get branch.master.remote
configured to "origin".  How will adding remote.pushdefault have any
impact, unless I explicitly remove this branch-specific remote
configuration?  Besides, without branch.<name>.remote configured, I
can't even pull and expect changes to be merged.  So, really: what is
the use of remote.pushdefault?

I'm dropping this patch, and just going with branch.<name>.pushremote,
unless you convince me otherwise.

That is why I described the scheme I did in [1]. It uses the following
two general rules:

  1. Per-branch config trumps repo-wide config.

  2. Push-specific config (e.g., "remote.pushdefault") trumps
     non-specific config (e.g., "remote.default") for pushing.

So the push lookup list is (in order of precedence):

  1. branch.*.pushremote
  2. remote.pushdefault
  3. branch.*.remote
  4. remote.default
  5. origin

and it solves Junio's issue because the way to say "override my
remote.pushdefault for this branch" is not to set "branch.*.remote", but
to set "branch.*.pushremote".

-Peff

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/215751