Git Worflow, branch creation.

[Ben Cooksley]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:22 PM, Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
> On Thursday, 19 de May de 2011 11:44:59 Stephen Kelly wrote:
>> Ben Cooksley wrote:
>> > Second you are heavily advocating rebasing. This shouldn't be done in
>> > public repositories as it:
>> > - Inflates the size of the repository.
>>
>> I thought git gc which runs periodically would mean that the repo size is
>> not inflated?
>
> Correct.

Doesn't apply to KDE repositories, as performing a rebase involves a
force push, which initiates the damage prevention area of our hooks.
This triggers creation of a "backup ref" protecting the contents of
the old ref from being affected by a gc, and ensures they are always
reachable.
It is a protective measure to guard against malicious force pushes or
branch deletions. (Note that git doesn't fetch backup refs normally)

Further, if the code you rebased is still accessible in it's original
form in another branch people will still need to download those
commits when they clone the repo.

>
>> > - Requires some Git magic to recover if the branch you are currently
>> > using gets force pushed.
>> > - Is detected as new commits by the hooks, which if you were to
>> > operate in the main repository would cause re-notification of commits.
>> >
>> > If you were to continue with your current workflow, then you would
>> > likely need the assistance of Sysadmin everytime you wanted to merge a
>> > significant feature which comprises of more than 100 commits into the
>> > main repository.
>>
>> Do wee have any information about feature branches of 100 commits? When KDE
>> developers push local branches how many commits are on them? Do we have
>> numbers about that?
>
> 100-commit feature branches probably will do merges and thus cannot be
> rebased.
>
> A rebasing branch is usually done by a single developer and should have in
> average up to 10 commits. 20 at the outset, then it starts to get really hard
> to maintain.
>
> --
> Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
>  Senior Product Manager - Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks
>      PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
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>