Re: [PATCH] add a 'pre-push' hook

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 19, 2008, 19:39 UTC
Message-ID: <7v63pw3ick.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <d411cc4a0808191200o39837fd0ka2530aed870e06b0@mail.gmail.com>

"Scott Chacon" <schacon@gmail.com> writes:

> If the patch is acceptable, I will update the githooks doc with more
> information, but we would like this so that you could add a hook that
> runs your automated tests before a push would go through.

I've said this number of times on this list but I guess it has been while since the last time I said it.

"If the patch is acceptable, I'll document it" is the last thing we as reviewers would want to hear from the submitter, *unless* there is an ongoing discussion that already have established what is wanted and a patch came as "ok, here is a possible solution, what do you guys think?".

If the original submitter does not care enough to defend why it is needed, why should reviewers spend their precious brain cycles to decipher what it does, guess what situation the change would help, and determine if the change actually would help the situation it might be trying to help (and risk wasting all this work because they guessed the motivation wrong)? And what assurance would we have that the change will be maintained and supported?

Having said that, I would agree "validate and potentially stop before pushing" is a very good thing to have.

It is still unclear at this point what kind of input that validation would want to base its decision on. At least we would want what branch is being pushed (so that a validation failure on a branch that is not being pushed would not interfere), and possibly where you are pushing to (so that you can still push a change you would want to verify and potentially polish on a different test/dev box without getting interfered).