Premises:

• Every project has at least one "canonical" repository. The canonical repo tracks the project's official history. New clones are created by cloning the canonical repo; the aliases below assume that the origin remote points to the canonical repo.

• Most development happens on short-lived feature branches, which are merged into the canonical repo's master branch when accepted. This merge should be non-fastforward, but the alias suite doesn't care.

• Developers publish proposed changes to their own repositories, not to the canonical repository directly. The aliases below expect the user's personal repo to be associated with a remote named with the user's login name. (It's fine if this is an alias for origin, provided you're extremely careful with the publish alias.)

• Branches in a developer's personal repository are "unstable" and may be rewritten by the author. (It's up to you to communicate with your team; if you're working with someone on a shared feature branch, using publish will lead to obnoxious cleanup work.)

• You have push.default set to simple. (If your version of git doesn't support this option, upgrade. The default behaviour of git push is unsupportably bad.)

• You sometimes want to use normal Git commands, too. (Otherwise, why aren't you using git-flow, tig, or some other workflow frontend?)

Usage:

Read the inline comments in aliases.gitconfig.

Installation:

$ git config --global --add include.path '/path/to/aliases.gitconfig'

Removal:

$ git config --global --unset include.aliases \
      '/path/to/aliases.gitconfig'