Introduce a checkout.defaultRemote setting which can be used to
designate a remote to prefer (via checkout.defaultRemote=origin) when
running e.g. "git checkout master" to mean origin/master, even though
there's other remotes that have the "master" branch.
I want this because it's very handy to use this workflow to checkout a
repository and create a topic branch, then get back to a "master" as
retrieved from upstream:
(
cd /tmp &&
rm -rf tbdiff &&
git clone g...@github.com:trast/tbdiff.git &&
cd tbdiff &&
git branch -m topic &&
git checkout master
)
That will output:
Branch 'master' set up to track remote branch 'master' from 'origin'.
Switched to a new branch 'master'
But as soon as a new remote is added (e.g. just to inspect something
from someone else) the DWIMery goes away:
(
cd /tmp &&
rm -rf tbdiff &&
git clone g...@github.com:trast/tbdiff.git &&
cd tbdiff &&
git branch -m topic &&
git remote add avar g...@github.com:avar/tbdiff.git &&
git fetch avar &&
git checkout master
)
Will output (without the advice output added earlier in this series):
error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.
The new checkout.defaultRemote config allows me to say that whenever
that ambiguity comes up I'd like to prefer "origin", and it'll still
work as though the only remote I had was "origin".
Also adjust the advice.checkoutAmbiguousRemoteBranchName message to
mention this new config setting to the user, the full output on my
git.git is now (the last paragraph is new):
$ ./git --exec-path=$PWD checkout master
error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.
hint: The argument 'master' matched more than one remote tracking branch.
hint: We found 26 remotes with a reference that matched. So we fell back
hint: on trying to resolve the argument as a path, but failed there too!
hint:
hint: If you meant to check out a remote tracking branch on e.g. 'origin'
hint: you can do so by fully-qualifying the name with the --track option:
hint:
hint: git checkout --track origin/
hint:
hint: If you'd like to always have checkouts of an ambiguous prefer
hint: one remote, e.g. the 'origin' remote, consider setting
hint: checkout.defaultRemote=origin in your config.
I considered splitting this into checkout.defaultRemote and
worktree.defaultRemote, but it's probably less confusing to break our
own rules that anything shared between config should live in core.*
than have two config settings, and I couldn't come up with a short
name under core.* that made sense (core.defaultRemoteForCheckout?).
See also 70c9ac2f19 ("DWIM "git checkout frotz" to "git checkout -b
frotz origin/frotz"", 2009-10-18) which introduced this DWIM feature
to begin with, and 4e85333197 ("worktree: make add
dwim", 2017-11-26) which added it to git-worktree.
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
---
Documentation/config.txt | 21 -
Documentation/git-checkout.txt | 9 +
Documentation/git-worktree.txt | 9 +
builtin/checkout.c | 12 +---
checkout.c | 26 --
t/t2024-checkout-dwim.sh | 18 +-
t/t2025-worktree-add.sh| 21 +
7 files changed, 109 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index dfc0413a84..aef2769211 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -350,7 +350,10 @@ advice.*::
remote tracking branch on more than one remote in
situations where an unambiguous argument would have
otherwise caused a remote-tracking branch to be
- checked out.
+ checked out. See the `checkout.defaultRemote`
+ configuration variable for how to set a given remote
+ to used by default in some situations where this
+ advice would be printed.
amWorkDir::
Advice that shows the location of the patch file when
linkgit:git-am[1] fails to apply it.
@@ -1105,6 +1108,22 @@ browser..path::
browse HTML help (see `-w` option in linkgit:git-help[1]) or a
working repository in gitweb (see linkgit:git-instaweb[1]).
+checkout.defaultRemote::
+ When you run 'git checkout ' and only have one
+ remote, it may implicitly fall back on checking out and
+ tracking e.g. 'origin/'. This stops working as soon
+ as you have more than one remote with a ''
+ reference. This setting allows for setting the name of a
+ preferred remote that should always win when it comes to
+ disambiguation. The typical use-case is to set this to
+ `origin`.
++
+Currently this is used by linkgit:git-checkout[1] when 'git checkout
