Changes to branch management

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 6:08 AM, Jan Kundrát <jkt at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday, 29 December 2014 09:50:06 CEST, Ben Cooksley wrote:
>>
>> Unfortunately allowing force pushes is an extremely messy business
>> with the hooks - so we're unable to do this (for maintenance reasons
>> among others).
>
>
> Could you please elaborate on this one?
>
> The only reason I remember ever hearing was "it will send all notification
> e-mails again when you force-push". Why would that be a problem? Would
> disabling e.g. the CCMAIL, BUG and CCBUG keywords (or the all of the
> notification hooks) in all branches that support force pushes be a
> reasonable fix?

Two reasons:

1) The notification hooks, as you mention above. Disabling them for
branches which permit force pushes would be a workaround for that, but
then we have more complexity in the hooks to look after.

2) The social problems that come with the lack of notifications.
Community code review via email is broken without them, and force
pushes require people to take action if they have interacted with such
a branch in the past.

Plus it means we'll have a 3 tier hierarchy of branches in our
mainline repos - "personal" branches one can force push, "work"
branches which are shared and the primary release branches. Seems like
it might be a bit complex.

>
> With kind regards,
> Jan

Thanks,
Ben

>
>
> --
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