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Bug 362392

Summary:

Better default for new local branches for remote tracking branches

Product:

[Technology] EGit

Reporter:

Eike Stepper <stepper>

Component:

Assignee:

Kevin Sawicki <kevin>

Status:

RESOLVED FIXED

QA Contact:

Severity:

enhancement

Priority:

CC:

mtaal, remy.suen, stefan.lay, stefan

Version:

1.2

Target Milestone:

---

Hardware:

OS:

Windows 7

Whiteboard:

Bug Depends on:

323950

Bug Blocks:

Attachments:

Description	Flags
Screenshot	none

Description Eike Stepper

2011-10-29 06:03:36 EDT

We're using hierarchical branch names, e.g., "streams/4.0". When creating a new local branch to track those remote branches (e.g., "origin/streams/4.0") the default branch name always seems to be the last segment of the remote branch name. It's all to easy for unexperienced users like myself to forget to add "streams/" before hitting Ok.

Can you change that default to contain everything but the leading "/refs/heads/origin/"?

Or am I completely misunderstanding something?

Comment 1 Eike Stepper

2011-10-29 06:04:00 EDT

Created attachment 206159 [details]
Screenshot

Comment 2 Eike Stepper

2011-10-30 01:37:04 EDT

(In reply to comment #0)
> Can you change that default to contain everything but the leading
> "/refs/heads/origin/"?

The latter should read "refs/remotes/origin/".

Having learned a little more about Git it seems that the default local branch name is a little harder to determine because the fetch refspec seems involved, too.

The canonical format of a refspec parameter is "?<src>:<dst>" where <src> is in the remote and <dst> is in the local clone.

The push refspec seems to be involved, too. A refspec parameter's format is the same, but <src> is in the local clone and <dst> is in the remote.

For a reasonable and common workflow between a remote and a clone it seems that the push <src> is identical to the fetch <src>.

That implies that a reasonable default for local branch names (push <src>) that fork from remote tracking branches (fetch <dst>) is the fetch <src>, i.e. the string that results from "reverse-applying" the fetch refspec to the remote tracking branch name.

Comment 3 Kevin Sawicki

2011-11-16 20:24:28 EST

Proposed fix pushed to: http://egit.eclipse.org/r/4632

Comment 4 Stefan Lay

2011-11-30 08:45:29 EST

> We're using hierarchical branch names, e.g., "streams/4.0". When creating a new
> local branch to track those remote branches (e.g., "origin/streams/4.0") the
> default branch name always seems to be the last segment of the remote branch
> name. 

Why do you create a local branch to track a remote branch? Branches like "origin/streams/4.0" already are called "remote tracking branch" because they track a remote branch. Normally a local branch is only created for local development.

> That implies that a reasonable default for local branch names (push <src>) that
> fork from remote tracking branches (fetch <dst>) is the fetch <src>, i.e. the
> string that results from "reverse-applying" the fetch refspec to the remote
> tracking branch name.

I do not think that the fetch refspec is relevant for the default name of a local branch. The fetch refspec matches a branch name on the remote server (<src>) with the name of the remote tracking branch on the local repository (<dst>). There is no local branch name involved.

I also do not think that an existing push refspec plays a role here. There may be many push refspecs which have the remote branch as target which is tracked by the remote tracking branch. 

Therefore I think, that commit 00c48f8d0e350ddcd6ef42303f045233bf386411 fixes the problem of "/" in the branch name.