Re: disallowing push to currently checked-out branch

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 16, 2009, 22:52 UTC
Message-ID: <20090216225226.GB23764@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <76718490902161428k7d252a02i3e79e4f197608891@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 05:28:38PM -0500, Jay Soffian wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Johannes Schindelin
> <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> >> Not consistent with what?
> >
> > With pushing into bare repositories.  And worse, with the existing mode of
> > operation.
> 
> I don't understand why pushing into a bare repo should have the same
> behavior as pushing into a non-bare repo. They are different workflows
> after-all.

Actually, I think it is pulling from the non-bare repo that will get confusing.

You are proposing to push, when pushing into a non-bare repo, into a push refspec like refs/incoming/ (for example). But what is your fetch refspec?

If it fetches as usual from refs/heads/, then you have an asymmetry. That is, if I do "git push" on one client, then "git pull" on another won't fetch the changes. I have to wait for the non-bare repo to pull them into its refs/heads/ hierarchy (one by one, if there are multiple branches).

So you can try putting refs/incoming into your fetch refspec if it is a non-bare repo. But there are two issues there:

  - how do you know the remote is non-bare?

  - now you have to "push" in the non-bare upstream in order to make
    commits available. So it no longer works to do:

       workstation$ cd repo && hack hack hack && commit commit commit
       laptop$ git clone workstation:repo

    since you will silently end up with stale results.

    In some ways, this is nicely rigorous: non-bare repos become
    essentially "uncontactable" remotely, and you have a de facto bare
    repo in the form of refs/incoming sitting in between. But I'm not
    sure it matches what most users want to do, and certainly it causes
    more breakage to their workflows than receive.denyCurrentBranch.

-Peff