Re: [RFD] Rewriting safety - warn before/when rewriting published history

From: Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>
Date: Feb 7, 2012, 15:09 UTC
Message-ID: <CALKQrge821x7OoSekkWw7vUjP642jhbE0D9oWPcCxuuTXOqQHA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201202071531.08385.jnareb@gmail.com>

(we are pretty much in violent agreement, so I will only comment where I find it necessary)

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 15:31, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Also, when thinking about different scenarios of why one would like to
> mark commit as 'secret', we might want to be able to mark commit as
> secret / unpublishable with respect to _subset_ of remotes, so e.g.
> I am prevented from accidentally publishing commits marked as 'secret'
> to public repository, or to CI/QA repository, but I can push (perhaps
> with warning) to group repository, together with 'secret'-ness state
> of said commit...
>
> ... though it wouldn't be as much 'secret' as 'confidential' ;-)

Another way to achieve this would be to have a config flag to control whether Git checks for the 'secret' flag before pushing. This config flag could be set at the system/user level (to enable/disable the feature as a whole), at the repo level (to enable/disable it in a given repo), at the remote level (to enable/disable it on a given repo), and finally at the branch level (to enable-disable it for a given branch (and its upstream)). Thus you could have a .git/config that looked like this:

  [core]
  refusePushSecret = true

  [remote "foo"]
  refusePushSecret = false
  url = ...
  fetch = ...

  [branch "baz"]
  remote = foo
  merge = refs/heads/baz
  refusePushSecret = true

This config would:

 - refuse to push 'secret' commits from branch 'baz'
(branch.baz.refusePushSecret == true)

 - but allow to push other branches with 'secret' commits to remote
'foo' (remote.foo.refusePushSecret == false)

 - but refuse to push 'secret' commits to other remotes
(core.refusePushSecret == true)

(The order of precedence would be: branch config > remote config > repo config > user config > system config > default when unset)

I am unsure whether the 'secret'-ness of a commit should follow across the push, but if you do (assuming we store the 'secret' flag using git-notes) this is simply a matter of synchronizing the refs/notes/secret to the same remote.

Have fun! :)

...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, <johan@herland.net>
www.herland.net