Can I enforce required approval on some files

Dear Group,

I have been a happy SVN user for quite a long time, but now I miss some functionality in Subversion. I wonder if it could be done in git. If so, I convert to git right away :-)

There are some files in our repository that all their modification
need to be approved by a project leader.  In general the desired
behavior would be (examples given in svn commands) :
- user runs "svn ci"
- some files have status "pending" or "waiting for approval"
- anyone can do "svn up", modifications to the pending files are not
retrieved, project leader can get the modified versions
- project leader accepts the changes
- anyone running "svn ci" sees all the modifications

Best, Tim

Dominik Gront <dgront@gmail.com> writes:

Either have the repository owned by someone who'll do whatever checking you want (which seems to be common at least amongst the public projects) or use hooks in a shared repository. Specifically the update hook.

The hook can do whatever checking you deem appropriate. At work we have it check the commit message for Signed-off-by names (in our context it really means Reviewed-by; we use sob because that's more convenient to add). The hook could look at which files are changed or whatever else you wanted. (Notice it gets called to update a ref, and that may involve more than one commit, so be sure to check all the relevant commits.)

[...]

On Tue, 2010-07-20 at 13:22 -0700, Dominik Gront wrote:

Hi,

Git itself does not allow what you want but the workflow used to work with git does.

Each developer work and on a "copy" of the "blessed" repository (the one checked out in svn, cloned in git) so it does not matter if modifications done to a file need approval or not. Once the developer is happy with his work he has to send his commit(s) to the person(s) in charge of maintaining the project and this/those people will review the changes and push (commit in svn language) them to the "blessed" repository if they are ok with the changes made.

With git, if not used like svn, all modifications need approval.

You can read more about git's distributed workflow here : http://progit.org/book/ch5-1.html

Regards.

Dominik Gront <dgront@gmail.com> writes:

Besides solution mentioned by others, namely integration repository with moderator, you can also use patch/commit code review tool such as Gerrit (http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/), equivalent of Rietveld for Subversion, or Mondrian for Perforce.

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 22:03, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

There's also the low-tech solution of just telling people to submit again until their patches don't suck, it works for git.git, and is attainable when you're not doing a centralized tool.

On Wed, 21 Jul 2010, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

That's what I meant by "besides [...] integration repository with moderator", moderator who reviews patches or pull requests, and accepts into integration repository or rejects them.