Re: backup or mirror a repository

[Dan Farina <drfarina@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 23:27 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> You can almost do it with
> 
> 	git push --all $remote
> 
> except there is no way to automagically remove the branch you
> removed from the local repository.  For that, we would need a
> new --mirror option to "git-push".

Yup! I actually was looking for such a thing in the git-push man page,
but was unsuccessful. I was living with git-push --all for a little
while before I thought I'd ask. Unfortunately, the preferred setup
(having the backup machine actively perform fetch and prune) is not very
nice for me due to firewalls.

> 
> I think it is trivial to do for native transports, as we first
> get the list of all refs from the remote side before starting
> the transfer.  You need to change the last parameter called
> 'all' to remote.c::match_refs() into an enum ('push_all' being
> one of choices), introduce another enum 'push_mirror', and teach
> it to "match" the remote (i.e. dst) ref that does not have
> corresponding entry on our side (i.e. src) with an empty object
> name to mark it removed.  Then the part marked as "Finally, tell
> the other end!"  in send-pack.c::send_pack() will take care of
> the actual removal.

I should have a look, but if someone else wants to work on this they
shouldn't block on me: work already made me get hit by a bus on one
project (luckily I wasn't important), and the storm is not over.

Thanks,
fdr