Git fork

I have decided to try and work on EGit (the git plugin for eclipse) in my spare time. First I have to grok git and that's proving harder than anticipated.

Now when I say version control I have a couple basic expectations:

• I want it to be easy to get a workspace
• I want it to be easy to publish my changes

So "the get a workspace" is easy with git :

$>git clone @projecturl clone #clone is the destination directory
$>cd clone
$clone>git branch -a
* master
origin/HEAD
origin/master
origin/stable

There you have your workspace.

Now editing master directly is not recommanded. you should make a local branch to work on your modifications and of course checkout this branch

$clone>git branch master work
$clone>git checkout work

(note that you can actually create the new branch as part of the checkout by using the -b argument)

Now I want the "publish my changes" part and that's not quite as straightforward ... Heading to the documentation tells me :

$clone>git push @sshurl master:master

but that seems like a lot of typing if I'm going to do it frequently. (not as frequently as commit but still ... Going further down gives me :

$clone>cat >>.git/config << EOF
[remote "public-repo"]
  url = @sshurl
  fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
EOF

yeah right, this makes the command [irony]soooo much smaller[/irony]

$clone> git push published master

but I am really lazy I want to only have to do "git push" so let's have a look at .git\config :

$clone>cat .git\config
[core]
  repositoryformatversion = 0
  filemode = false
  bare = false
  logallrefupdates = true
  symlinks = false
  ignorecase = true
[remote "origin"]
  url = @projecturl
  fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
  remote = origin
  merge = refs/heads/master
[remote "public-repo"]
  url = ssh://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git
  fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

Here goes my solution :

$clone>cat >>.git/config << EOF
[branch "work"] 
  remote =public-repos
  merge = refs/heads/master
EOF

Now you can just do git push from your "work" branch to your public repository!

[rant]why do I have to update the config file by hand for such an obvious use case ... go figure ![rant]