Re: Subject: [PATCH] Push to create

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 3, 2009, 08:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20090303082318.GB3158@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vtz6bf392.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 11:56:57PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > I concur w/Jeff and I think git probably should not as well. I think
> > that instead adding it to init might be interesting
> 
> The thing is Jeff and Shawn already rejected that route.

Since when do you listen to me? ;P

I think there are actually two issues to be resolved, though:

  1. What is a standardized way for clients to ask for repo creation?

  2. How do users trigger that repo creation.

I think once you have (1), then (2) is easy. You can have "git init host:dir", "git push --init remote", or whatever, and they can all trigger the same mechanism. For systems which have an out-of-band method, they can continue to behave as they have, or they can hook into the standardized mechanism as if they were clients themselves. So there is not that much point in debating (2), I think, until there is a working (1).

Now (1) is much harder. Some parameters come from the user, but some (including whether creation is allowed at all) must come from the site administrator. And some site administrators will a hook to do whatever site-specific magic they need.

What about the client just calling init-serve on the server as a program which does whatever it wants to create a repo? The shipped default would be:

  #!/bin/sh
  echo >&2 Sorry, repo creation not allowed.
  exit 1

Sites who want to give their users full creation access would do (and obviously the --mkdir option would need to be added):

  #!/bin/sh
  exec git init --mkdir "$@"

Sites which want to restrict can do:

  #!/bin/sh
  for i in "$@"; do
    case "$i" in
    --bare) ;;
         *) echo >&2 Forbidden argument: $i; exit 1 ;;
    esac
  done
  exec git init --mkdir "$@"

Sites like GitHub or Gerrit can munge the arguments as appropriate. They could even allow site-specific options if they wanted as long as they were syntactically correct (i.e., "git init --gerrit-base=foo remote" would pass the argument through to the remote unharmed).

-Peff