gitolite/contrib/adc/hub.mkd

the 'hub' ADC

In this document:

• a home grown 'hub' for git repos
• general syntax
  • Bob's commands
  • Alice's "just looking" commands
  • Alice's "action" commands
• what next?
• note to the admin: configuration variables

a home grown 'hub' for git repos

This ADC (admin-defined command) helps collaboration among repos. The name is in honor of github, which is the primary host for gitolite itself.

[Note that github is a web-based service, and does a lot more, like comments, code reviews, etc., none of which are possible here. We're only talking about some basic stuff to make the most common operations easier. In particular, this system is not a replacement for normal project communications like email!]

Conventions used: all through the following description, we will assume that Alice has a repo parent, Bob has a fork of parent called child, and he is asking Alice to pull a branch he made called b1 from child to parent.

In plain git (without using github or similar), the pull request process starts with an email from Bob to Alice, followed by Alice running a git fetch <Bob's URL> b1 (optionally preceded by a git remote add for convenience of long term use). Until this happens she can't see much detail about the commits to be pulled.

What this ADC does is (a) collect all the pull requests she needs to look at in one place, and (b) allow her to examine the changes with any combination of git log and git diff options without having to fetch the content first, and (c) act as a trusted intermediary to allow Alice to fetch just one branch from Bob even if she does not have any access to Bob's repository!

In a situation where there may be lots of requests, being able to take a quick look at them (and possibly reject some), without having to pull down anything at all, could be very useful.

Once past that level, she could get the changes down to her workstation using git fetch as normal. With this ADC, however, she has another alternative: get them over to parent (her repo) on the same gitolite server, then later do a normal git fetch [origin] to get it to her workstation. This has the added advantage that other people, who may be watching her repo but not Bob's, now get to see what Bob sent her and send comments etc.

general syntax

The general syntax is

ssh git@server hub <hub-command> <args>

Bob's commands

The following commands do not cause a fetch, and should be quite fast:

• Bob sends a pull request for branch b1 to repo parent. Notice he does not mention Alice by name. This command expects a message to be piped/typed in via STDIN [this message is meant to be transient and is not stored long term; use email for more "permanent" communications].

  echo "hi Alice, please pull" | ssh git@server hub request-pull child b1 [parent]
  

  If child was created by a recent version of the 'fork' ADC (or the KDE 'clone' ADC), which records the name of the parent repo on a fork, and it is that repo to which Bob wishes to send the pull request, the third argument is optional.

• Bob lists the status (fetched/rejected/pending) of pull requests he has made from his repo child to repo parent. (Note we don't say "accepted" but "fetched"; see later for why):

  ssh git@server hub request-status child [parent]
  

  The second argument is optional the same way as the 3rd argument in the previous command.

  Requests that have been accepted or rejected will usually have some additional text, supplied by the user who did the reject/accept. Bob can ask for those details by request number:

  ssh git@server hub request-status child [parent] request-number
  

Alice's "just looking" commands

• Alice lists requests waiting for her to check and possibly pull into parent. For each waiting pull request, she will see a serial number, the originating repo name (child, in our example), the requestor (Bob, here), and the branch/tag-name (b1) being pulled:

  ssh git@server hub list-requests parent
  

  This command also takes an optional list of search strings that are OR-d together and matched against the 'status' field. So saying

  ssh git@server hub list-requests parent fetched pending
  

  would list only items that were 'fetched' or 'pending' (meaning 'accepted' and 'rejected' would not show up).

• Alice views request # 1 waiting to be pulled into parent. Shows the same details as above for that request, followed by the message that Bob typed in when he ran request-pull:

  ssh git@server hub view-request parent 1
  

• Alice views the log of the branch she is being asked to pull. Note that this does NOT involve a fetch, so it will be pretty fast. The log starts from b1, and stops at a SHA that represents any of the branches in parent. Alice can use any git-log options she wants to; for instance --graph, --decorate, --boundary, etc., could be quite useful. However, she can't use any GUI; it has to be 'git log':

  ssh git@server hub view-log parent 1 <git log options>
  

  Notice that the repo name Alice supplies is still her own, although the log comes from the child repo that Bob wants Alice to pull from. It's best if you think of this as "view the commits from pull request #1 in 'parent'".

• Alice views the diff between arbitrary commits on child:

  ssh git@server hub view-diff parent 1 <git diff options>
  

  Again, she mentions her reponame but the diff's come from child. Also note that, due to restrictions on what characters are allowed in arguments to ADCs, you probably can't do things like pu^ or master~3, and have to use SHAs instead.

Alice's "action" commands

• Alice doesn't like what she sees and decides to reject it. This command expects some text on STDIN as the rejection message:

  echo "hi Bob, your patch needs work; see email" | ssh git@server hub reject parent 1
  

• Alice likes what she sees so far and wants to fetch the branch Bob is asking her to pull. Note that we are intentionally not using the word "accept", because this command does not (and cannot, since it is running on a bare repo on the server) do a pull. What it does is it fetches into a branch whose name will be requests/child/b1.

  Note that when multiple requests from the same repo (child) for the same branch (b1) happen, each "fetch" overwrites the branch. This allows Bob to continually refine the branch he is requesting for a pull based on (presumably emailed) comments from Alice. In a way, this is a "remote tracking branch", just like refs/remotes/origin/b1.

  ssh git@server hub fetch parent 1
  

  This command will actually fetch from child into parent, and may take time when the changes are large. However all this is on the server so it does not involve network traffic:

• Alice has fetched the stuff she wants, looked at it/tested it, and decides to merge it into parent. Once that is done, she runs:

  echo "thanks for the frobnitz patch Bob" | ssh git@server hub accept parent 1
  

  to let Bob know next time he checks 'request-status'. Like the reject sub-command, this is also just a status update; no actual 'git' changes happen.

Notice the sequence of Alice's action commands: it's either 'reject', or a 'fetch' then 'accept'.

what next?

At this point, you're done with the hub ADC. However, all this is on the bare parent.git on the server, and nothing has hit Alice's workstation yet! Alice will still have to run a fetch or a pull on her workstation if she wants to check the code in detail, use a tool like gitk, and especially to compile/test it. Then she decides whether to accept or reject the request, which will have to be communicated via email, of course; see the second para of this document ;-)

Finally, note that Alice does not actually need to use the fetch subcommand. She can do the traditional thing and fetch Bob's repo/branch directly to her workstation.

note to the admin: configuration variables

There are 2 configuration variables. BASE_FETCH_URL should be set to a simple "read" URL (so it doesn't even have to be ssh) that almost anyone using this server can use. It's only used in producing the git fetch command mentioned just above.

GL_FORKED_FROM is set to gl-forked-from by default, but if your initials are JM you can set it to kde-cloned-from to save time and trouble ;-)