Re: fast-forward only policy

[John Carr <john carr unrouted co uk>]

Hi,

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeenix gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>  I was one of the happiest person on this planet the day we moved to
> git and i can't thanks the people involved enough. Although overall i
> am pretty happy with the migration, I do have one concern: The policy
> of disallowing non-fastforward pushes to any branch. I understand that
> this is good for master and other stable branches, but otoh I think it
> breaks the usual git workflow for feature branches.

I don't think it does break the usual git workflow. See [1] and [2].
In particular:

"Rebasing is clearly a useful technique, though. Linus does not tell
developers not to use it; in fact, he encourages it sometimes. The key
rule that was passed down is this: Thou Shalt Not Rebase Trees With
History Visible To Others"

"This means: if you're still in the "git rebase" phase, you don't push
it out. If it's not ready, you send patches around, or use private git
trees (just as a "patch series replacement") that you don't tell the
public at large about."

git.gnome.org is quite public. There is email and IRC spam and
everything. Suppose you could use heuristics to turn that off, but not
really a fan of that. I for one want the spam on all my branches (if
im still in rebase phase im not pushing to GNOME).

>  I had a little chat with Owen regarding this:
>
> == IRC LOG BEGIN==
> <zeenix> owen: hi, are we sure about this 'only fastforward for all
> branches' policy?
> <owen> zeenix: Well, if we had a way of figuring out that some
> branches where feature branches not maintenance branches, then we
> could conceivablly allow rebasing those branches
>  zeenix: But not sure how to do that. I suppose we could say if there
> are no numbers in the branch name it's a feature branch, but that
> would make thigns weird if you had a branch 'bonobo-removal-2' or
> something
> <zeenix> owen: or you could make developer put some specific prefix in
> the name of feature branches?
> <owen> would be a bit ugly if all our branches were named feature-*
> <owen> zeenix: feel free to mail suggestions for a policy to
> gnome-infrastructure
> <zeenix> ok, will do
> ==IRC LOG END==
>
>   I am sending this mail here cause I thought it might be better to
> have a discussion on this and so that other developers can speak-up if
> they (dis)agree.
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
> FSF member#5124


John

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/328436/
[2] http://lwn.net/Articles/328438/