Re: problem with not being able to enforce git content filters

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Oct 16, 2018, 23:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20181016232636.GF432229@genre.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <5d4966c8-8171-9a0a-5120-f7c151c2b81f@stason.org>

On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 01:36:37PM -0700, Stas Bekman wrote:

Show 26 quoted lines

> The problem is that it can't be enforced.
> 
> When it's not enforced, we end up with some devs using it and others
> don't, or more often is the same dev sometimes doesn't have it configured.
> 
> When a person has a stripped out notebook checked out, when another
> person commits un-stripped out notebook, it leads to: invalid `git
> status` reports, `git pull` breaks, `git stash` doesn't work, since it
> tries to stash using the filters, and `git pull' can never succeed
> because it thinks that it'll overwrite the local changes, but `git diff`
> returns no changes.
> 
> So the only solution when this happens is to disable the filters, clean
> up the mess, re-enable the filters. Many people just make a new clone -
> ouch!
> 
> And the biggest problem is that it affects all users who may have the
> filters enabled, e.g. because they worked on a PR, and not just devs -
> i.e. the repercussions are much bigger than just a few devs affected.
> 
> We can't use server-side hooks to enforce this because the project is on
> github.
> 
> And the devs honestly try to do their best to remember to configure the
> filters, but for some reason they disappear for them, don't ask me why,
> I don't know. This is an open source project team, not a work place.

This sounds like it could be easily solved by continuous integration. You could set up a job on any of a variety of services that checks that a pull request or other commit is clean when when the filter runs. If it doesn't pass, the code doesn't merge.

This is what other projects do for style-related and tidiness issues. Similar approaches can be used in other situations to enforce that all line endings are LF, or whatever your project desires.

I don't think it's a good idea to provide Git configuration to end users, even with prompting, since there are many novice users who don't know what the security implications of various config options are. I also personally never would want to be prompted for such a thing, so even if that were a feature, people would turn if off, and you'd be no better off than you were before.

-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204