Re: (Ab)using filter-branch from a post-receive hook

[Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com>]

On Jul 14, 2012, at 10:25 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com> writes:
> 
>> Specifically, I was thinking of doing the following:
>> 
>> - on pushing into our authoritative repo, we replicate to a second
>> "scratch" repo where all the dirty work gets done
>> 
>> - the scratch repo has a master branch, and an initial "open" branch
>> created using `git filter-branch`
> 
> Who controls when "authoritative" to "scratch" transfer happens?
> Using post-receive-hook in "authoritative" sounds like a sensible
> way to do this.
> 
>> - a post-receive hook in the scratch repo, given a series of commits
>> A..B on the master branch, cherry-picks them onto the "open" branch,
>> producing commits A'..B'
> 
> Are there mechanisms to add commits to the "scratch" repository
> other than the one that relays the changes from "authoritative"?  If
> so, post-receive in "scratch" may be inevitable, but otherwise, I do
> not know why you need this processing triggered by the post-receive
> in the scratch.  Wouldn't it suffice to make the post-receive in the
> "authoritative" do all of these?
> 
> I did not see anything wrong doing what you described in the
> post-receive, even though having the hook in the "scratch" felt
> strange, as the "copying from authoritative" would also want to be
> automated and the natural triggering mechanism to do so would be a
> post-receive there.  What issues were you worried about?

The part that I left out, to keep things simple, is that our actual repository structure is the following:

- developers work in their local clones and push to Gerrit (for code review)

- commits which pass code review get merged by Gerrit, and auto-replicated to a couple of places (specifically, an upstream repo in our colo for deployment purposes, and a private GitHub repo, for redundancy)

Gerrit has its own embedded Java-powered Git daemon, but it doesn't support post-receive hooks like the native Git daemon does, so in order to run arbitrary code like we'd need to, we have to tell Gerrit to replicate into some other (non-Gerrit) repo which is capable of running the hook. This was the "scratch" repo that I described above, and I was thinking of putting it on the same machine as Gerrit with a "file" URL and an appropriately configured receivepack property as suggested here by Shawn Pearce[1].

(Gerrit _does_ have its own hook system[2], but I'd feel more comfortable writing this using a standard hook, as I think the code will be more straightforward, and it won't couple us any more tightly to Gerrit than we already are.)

Cheers,
Wincent

[1] http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=383#c2
[2] http://gerrit.googlecode.com/svn/documentation/2.2.0/config-hooks.html#_change_merged