Re: [PATCH v6 0/4] Add --base option to git-format-patch to record base tree info

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 11:05 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> writes:
>
>>     git checkout origin/master
>>     # toy around, do stuff
>>     git checkout -b new-shiny-feature
>>     git format-patch origin-master..
>>
>> Now I have set the format.useautobase option and then the `git format-patch`
>> fails with
>>
>>     fatal: Failed to get upstream, if you want to record base commit
>> automatically,
>>     please use git branch --set-upstream-to to track a remote branch.
>>     Or you could specify base commit by --base=<base-commit-id> manually.
>>
>> but as I indicated I want patches from origin/master onwards,
>> Could we make use of that information?
>
> As you indicated where other than in this e-mail?
>
> I think the way for you to indicate that desire expected by this
> series is to use "git branch" to set upstream of new-shiny-feature
> branch to origin/master.  Shouldn't that work, or is that too much
> work?

I can totally do that for longer series which require some back and forth.

But one-offs, such as typo fixes or other small things[1], for which I do
even have a local branch (i.e. checkout origin/master && fix &&
commit && send-email) this is another step that potentially bothers me.
Maybe I'll get used to it.

>From a UI perspective it seems logical to also check if the base
can be obtained from the patch range specifier. the message of
patch 2 focuses on the advantages for the maintainer and 3rd party
people. So I was just testing it as an individual contributor to ensure
it can be used easily. (People only use this once the benefits outweigh
the disadvantages. And as we do not have any advantage of it in Git,
the negatives need to be kept low?)

Thanks,
Stefan

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/292634