Re: publishing a forked^W cloned directory with ancestry

From: martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net>
Date: Sep 4, 2007, 14:17 UTC
Message-ID: <20070904141730.GA25759@lapse.madduck.net>
In-Reply-To: <20070830202747.GT10772@jukie.net>

also sprach J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org> [2007.08.30.2149 +0200]:

> Maybe the one extra "git remote add ...; git remote fetch" isn't
> such a big deal?

[...]

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> Sure, each of those could add a "linus" branch that tracked
> upstream, so I could still get some idea what Linus's tree was
> even if I didn't happen to already have it.  But then I'd end up
> with 4 different slightly-out-of-date pointers to the head of
> linus's repo in each of those trees, which would end up being just
> be a bunch of cruft that I'd have to ignore whenever I looked at
> them.

Thanks to you and everyone else who replied! I spent some time off computers and still found myself thinking about this as I was hiking around woods and mountains and in the end, it's perfectly obvious:

I am trying to make it easy for third parties to contribute to my git-managed project and I (somewhat rightfully) assumed that I needed to shield my poor contributors from git's complex tentacles. In doing so, I find myself going backwards and turning git into something svn-like, thus losing much of its power.

The solution is clear: maintain only my Debian branch on git.debian.org and expect those cloning it to add the upstream remote themselves in true distributed manners. A concise file in the project root with instructions is a nice add-on.

also sprach Bart Trojanowski <bart@jukie.net> [2007.08.30.2227 +0200]:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Now when you 'git push debian' it will populate the 'upstream' and
> 'master' branches properly.
> 
> When someone clones your repo, they will get origin/master (your
> branch) and origin/upstream (the official mdadm branch).

This is the solution I had stuck in my head for the longest time (after you proposed it), but I eventually discard it for one simple reason: the danger that someone pushes to the upstream branch and thus diverges it from the real upstream is just too high and would result in a pretty nasty mess, as far as I can tell.

> Did I understand the problem correctly?

I think you did. And thanks for that. I hope my reasoning above also makes sense.

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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