Please discuss: what "git push" should do when you do not say what to push?

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

There is a proposal to change the default behaviour of 'git push' on the
Git mailing list. The goal of this message is to encourage you to discuss
it before it happens (or the change is aborted, depending on the outcome
of the discussion).

In the current setting (i.e. push.default=matching), 'git push' without
argument will push all branches that exist locally and remotely with the
same name. This is usually appropriate when a developer pushes to his own
public repository, but may be confusing if not dangerous when using a
shared repository. The proposal is to change the default to 'upstream',
i.e. push only the current branch, and push it to the branch 'git pull'
would pull from. Another candidate is 'current'; this pushes only the
current branch to the remote branch of the same name.

For more details on the behavior of Git with these values, read the
documentation about 'push.default' in 'man git-config'
(http://schacon.github.com/git/git-config.html).

You may be negatively affected when such a change happens if you do not
see anything in the output from 'git config push.default' and if you rely
on the default that pushes all your matching branches. On the other hand,
you may want to see the default behaviour to change, especially if you are
using shared repositories. In either case, please join the discussion to
give us more data point and help us decide the future of Git. Also, if
you think your friends and colleagues will be affected by this change,
either positively or negatively, please tell them about this discussion.

What has been discussed so far can be seen in this thread:

    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/192547/focus=192694

Previous relevant discussions include:

    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/123350/focus=123541
    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/166743

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    git@vger.kernel.org

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