On Wed Oct 23, 2024 at 23:56, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 10:09:38PM +0200, Bence Ferdinandy wrote:
>
>> > And possibly we could make it easier to just grab the remote name with a
>> > single command.
>>
>> As I was running this patch through my head yesterday I sort of distilled my
>> argument in favour to "writing remote agnostic scripts are unnecessarily
>> complicated", but I do agree, that if there were a git command that could
>> return the remote for a branch without any extra scripting hacks would easily
>> get you the same result, and may even be useful elsewhere.
>>
>> I'm not sure where this would be the best. Maybe:
>> git branch --show-current-remote
>> ?
>
> I've been giving some thought to this.
>
> You could argue it's about querying remotes, so "git remote". Although
> we don't really want to know anything about the remote except its name,
> so it's a little weird.
>
> Or as you note, we're querying info about a branch. So "git branch"
> makes sense. But "--show-current-remote" feels kind of narrow there.
> Shouldn't we be able to ask about the configured remote for any branch?
>
> In which case it is really just a single "git config" lookup away:
>
> git config branch.$branch.remote
>
> You have to look up the current branch, of course. You can do that with
> symbolic-ref like:
>
> git config "branch.$(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD).remote"
>
> You might get an error from symbolic-ref if we're on a detached HEAD, of
> course. You can either ignore that (in which case the lookup of
> "branch..remote" would show nothing), or a script can actually
> distinguish the two cases ("not on a branch" versus "there is no
> configured remote").
>
> There's also another wrinkle we hadn't discussed: we have the concept of
> both an upstream remote for fetching and a push remote. And this would
> naturally extend there (you'd ask for .pushremote instead).
>
> And finally, there's yet another way to access this information. ;) The
> for-each-ref formatter (which is also used for "branch --format") knows
> how to show remote names (and much more). So:
>
> git branch --list --format='%(upstream:remotename)' $branch
>
> also gets you what you want. I don't think there's a good way to ask
> that command to show just the branch pointed to by HEAD, though. We
> recently added --include-root-refs to for-each-ref, but that's not quite
> what you want (you want just HEAD, and you really want to dereference it
> to show details of the branch it points to).
>
> So I think rather than "branch --show-current-remote", we'd want
> some option to make "branch --list" show only the currently checked out
> branch, and then you could apply --format to it to get whatever
> information you wanted. Something like:
>
> git branch --list --is-head --format='%(upstream:remotename)'
Thanks for running through this in such detail! This would be more widely
useful for sure.
I'd probably call the flag something like "--current", "--current-only" rather
than "--is-head" though. "--is-head" sounds as if it would filter --list but
not necessarily end up with a single entry.
Anyway, thanks for the idea, I'll probably pick this up sooner or later.
Best,
Bence
--
bence.ferdinandy.com
