Re: What about allowing multiple hooks?

Alexander Potashev <aspotashev@gmail.com> writes:

I deliberately omitted support for multiple scripts in core git Porcelains to avoid this exact issue. It is a huge can of worms and it is dubious if you can have a coherent and generic enough semantics.

In the meantime, you can have a single .git/hooks/pre-commit script that defines your own convention. Maybe it uses .git/hooks/pre-commit.d/ directory, full of scripts, and implements the semantics you want, including:

 (1) the execution order and the naming convention of the scripts (e.g.
     they all live in pre-commit.d/ directory, and executed in ASCII byte
     value order of their names);

 (2) how their exit status combine together.  For example, maybe a failure
     from one of the scripts prevents none of the later scripts to even
     run and make the whole hook return a failure; maybe a failure will be
     remembered, but the other scripts may still want to be run to learn
     about the fact that the commit was attempted, and the whole hook
     returns a failure if any of them fail.

     In a hook that is run primarily for its side effects and not for
     validation, it may even be desireble if the whole hook returns a
     failure only when all of them fail, iow, for such a hook the status
     is not ANDed but ORed together.

Once you have such a framework and get help from others to widely try it in the field, it may prove generic enough to include it as the sample hook script to be installed everywhere.