FWIW, this might be an inherent limitation of Gerrit. Gerrit stores everything, including patches, as git objects. If your local copy of the upstream branch is not exactly identical (by git hash) to the one uploaded to the upstream issue, Gerrit has no way of linking the new CL to the original, since it doesn't know its git hash.

Consider `git cl upload --dependencies' from the upstream branch. See 'git cl upload --help' for more info.

Cool, thanks for the tip, Sergey!

That's not exactly what I was looking for though; I really want something more like 'git cl upload --ancestors' that brings all the parent branches up to date so I could upload the descendent branch.

Agreed. I think it's a good feature request for Infra>SDK. Thanks for filing!

You don't actually want "git cl upload --ancestors" in this case, since the ancestor is a copy of someone else's change created with "git cl patch", and you probably don't want to upload a duplicate of their change.

What you really want is to upload your change on top of the real change uploaded by someone else. For that, create the change from the preexisting patch using "git cl patch --force". Then the upload of the dependent change will work just fine.