[Kde-scm-interest] Gitolite server-side clones and personal branches

[Johannes Sixt]

Am 6/16/2010 13:49, schrieb Simon Hausmann:
> On Saturday, June 12, 2010 ext Jeff Mitchell, wrote:
> [...]
>> The other way to do it is simply to allow people to create branches with
>> a specific namespace -- e.g. personal/myname/mybranch -- but that are a
>> normal ref that everyone gets. This makes the checkout size of the repo
>> go up (although generally slightly) and means everyone sees all of them,
>> but it also means cgit/redmine see them too.
> 
> In my experience that quickly becomes very messy, unless you have enough 
> discipline to regularly clean up old branches.
> 
> We've done that a while for QtWebKit development and I would not recommend to 
> go down that route.

But you can place such branches in a new ref namespace on the server:
refs/personal/myname/mybranch (as opposed to refs/heads/personal/....).
Such refs are hidden from regular clone/fetch/pull, but you can still
access them using

  git pull origin personal/myname/mybranch

Users who regularly exchange topics in this way can write them down in the
config file:

   fetch = +refs/personal/hausmann/*:refs/remotes/origin/hausmann/*

To push such a branch for the first time is not straight-forward, though:

   git push origin my-topic:refs/personal/hausmann/my-topic

and I don't know whether cgit and redmine can show or work with such refs,
and any cleanup is still not automatic ;)

-- Hannes

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