markmcb_blog

I pounded my head against the wall for a bit when trying to play out this scenario in Git:

• Remote repository has two branches: master and some-long-complex-name
• Locally, I have cloned master
• I have set up my config to refer to the remote master as “origin”
• I have checked out some-long-complex-name using the following:

$ git checkout --track -b simple-name origin/some-long-complex-name

The key thing to note is that my local branch has a different name than the remote branch, i.e., “simple-name” is my local branch that’s tracking the remote branch “some-long-complex-name”.  I’ve used pseudo-branch-names in this example, but in practice I like my local branch names to be 3 characters or so such that they’re easy to type, and I like the remote branches to have long names such that there is no ambiguity about what they are.

My initial .git/config looked like this after the aforementioned checkout command:

[remote "origin"]
        url = ssh://myserv/srv/git/proj.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
        remote = origin
        merge = refs/heads/master
[branch "simple-name"]
        remote = origin
        merge = refs/heads/some-long-complex-name

Now, this isn’t too bad.  All pull related commands work, but push only works for the master branch.  What I wanted was git to push to “some-long-complex-name” whenever I ran “git push” from my local “simple-name” branch.

I changed .git/config to look like this:

[remote "origin"]
    url = ssh://myserv/srv/git/proj.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
        remote = origin
[remote "simple_origin"]
        url = ssh://myserv/srv/git/proj.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
        push = simple-name:some-long-complex-name
[branch "simple-name"]
        remote = simple_origin
        merge = refs/heads/some-long-complex-name

Note the additional “remote” section and the “push” reference.  Now, when I’m in my simple-name branch, I can just type “git push” and this branch will push out to the remote branch names “some-long-complex-name”.

Thanks to those who offered help on the freenode IRC #git channel, namely RandalSchwartz.