Merge or Cherry-Pick?

[Dawit A]

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 4:10 AM, Stefan Majewsky
<stefan.majewsky at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Dawit A <adawit at kde.org> wrote:
>> git config --global push.default tracking
>>
>> and use the -t or --track option when creating your branches (branch
>> or checkout -b). This way you can 'git push' (no arguments) in the
>> current tracked branch without accidentally pushing your changes in
>> other branches.
>
> I think this is the default. When I do "git checkout -b somework
> origin/somework" here, it automatically sets up somework to track
> origin/somework.

Right, but only for a remote branch.

> Push by default only operates on the tracking branch,
> i.e. push --all needs to be specified manually.

Well that is exactly what I assumed, but it turned out not to be the
case. See "push.default" in git-config man page. By default it
operates on all "matching" branches not just the current branch.
Unless you change the push default, you end up with the problem I had
where all the changes in my local master branch where pushed into
remote master when I only meant to push a fix from my local 4.6 branch
to the remote 4.6 branch. Of course, if I had issued "git push origin
HEAD:<branch>" instead, I would not have screwed up, but I did not.
Hence this heads up. Change the default push behavior in your config
to avoid making the same mistake I did...