# [RFC] Per-branch receive.* settings

2 messages from 2011-01-18 to 2011-01-19. Participants: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Junio C Hamano.
Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/26303

## Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, 2011-01-18 23:07

Subject: [RFC] Per-branch receive.* settings
Message-ID: <AANLkTimt8BPKsiyVEO+7i+so8337LaUu4A4jpywvJ-Ar@mail.gmail.com>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/AANLkTimt8BPKsiyVEO%2B7i%2Bso8337LaUu4A4jpywvJ-Ar%40mail.gmail.com

```
Currently you can do in your server's git config:

    [receive]
        denyDeletes = true
        denyNonFastForwards = true

But for most servers that's not what you want, you actually want to
deny those things to the master branch, but allow people to have their
private topic branches that they can reset. So how about allowing:

    [receive]
        denyDeletes = false
        denyNonFastForwards = false

    [branch "master"]
        denyDeletes = true
        denyNonFastForwards = true

I.e. have a per-branch setting that overrides the global setting?

(Of course ideally this would be:
    "branch.master.receive.{denyDeletes,denyNonFastForwards}"

But the *.ini format can only have a depth of three, so it has to be:

    "branch.master.{denyDeletes,denyNonFastForwards}"

Or perhaps:

    "branch.master.receive-{denyDeletes,denyNonFastForwards}"

Anyway, I can code this up if there's interest in it. This could also
be done with a .git/hooks/update hook, but IMO it's better to have
this as a documented setting for the most common things you want to
deny/allow.

```

## Junio C Hamano, 2011-01-19 00:12

Subject: Re: [RFC] Per-branch receive.* settings
Message-ID: <7vbp3dkaz8.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/7vbp3dkaz8.fsf%40alter.siamese.dyndns.org
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimt8BPKsiyVEO+7i+so8337LaUu4A4jpywvJ-Ar@mail.gmail.com>

```
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

> Currently you can do in your server's git config:
>
>     [receive]
>         denyDeletes = true
>         denyNonFastForwards = true
>
> But for most servers that's not what you want, you actually want to
> deny those things to the master branch, but allow people to have their
> private topic branches that they can reset. So how about allowing:
>
>     [receive]
>         denyDeletes = false
>         denyNonFastForwards = false
>
>     [branch "master"]
>         denyDeletes = true
>         denyNonFastForwards = true

While this would not be better than having no such feature, if you are
talking about allow(ing) "people", I doubt this would scale very well.

I wonder some globbing with site-specific naming convention would be more
scalable:

	[receive]
        	denyDeletes = refs/heads/* && !refs/heads/*/*
                denyNonFastForwards = refs/heads/* && !refs/heads/*/*

And in the meantime, of course you can use your update hook, mimicking
various examples, ranging from contrib/hooks/update-paranoid,
Documentation/howto/update-hook-example.txt, and hooks/update.sample.

```