Re: Alternates and push

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Sep 6, 2008, 19:21 UTC
Message-ID: <20080906192106.GB18631@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <9e4733910809061124r3759ea79sda98b549df3e6e58@mail.gmail.com>

Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On 9/6/08, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > Theodore Tso <tytso@MIT.EDU> writes:
> >
> >  > Long-standing mis-feature in git's logic in deciding what to push.
> >  > It's been reported a few times, but apparently it's hard to fix, or at
> >  > least it never hsa been fixed as far as I know.
> >
> >
> > This comes from an early (mis)design of git.
> 
> What happens if I set a remote in my github digispeaker repo pointing
> to github's linus repo and the set a chron script to fetch it once a
> day? The alternates link is still in place.

github should do what repo.or.cz does:

	ln -s .../linus.git/refs digispeaker.git/refs/forkee

That way the refs available in Linus' tree are also available in your tree as Git will transparently follow the symlink.

However you have to be careful to make sure `git pack-refs` isn't run with `--all --prune` as it will delete the refs from linus.git when executed in digispeaker.git. Fun times when I did that to my own repository one day. ;-)

Though we probably should fix Git to be somewhat smarter. But until that stable binary is available, the symlink trick above is a good work around.

-- 
Shawn.