Re: Tools that do an automatic fetch defeat "git push --force-with-lease"

[lists@haller-berlin.de (Stefan Haller)]

Stefan Haller <lists@haller-berlin.de> wrote:

> Then, every command that either integrates the remote tracking branch
> into the local branch, or updates the remote tracking branch to the
> local branch, will update the value of the "lease" entry. The most
> obvious ones are "git pull" and "git push", or course;

I thought a bit more about what this means, concretely. The problem is
that only a *successful* pull must update the lease; an unsuccessful
pull must leave it alone. Pull is either fetch+merge or fetch+rebase,
and if the merge or rebase fails with conflicts, then we can only tell
much later whether the pull was successful; in the case of merge only
after the next commit (success) or after git merge --abort (failure),
and in the case of rebase after the next rebase --continue (success), or
rebase --abort (failure).

To implement this, git pull could set the value "branch.*.pending-lease"
after fetch was successful (but leave "branch.*.lease" alone); then git
merge and git rebase could look for that value, and if successful, set
branch.*.lease to the value of branch.*.pending-lease, and delete
pending-lease. If unsuccessful, they'd just delete the pending-lease
entry. Other command may also have to delete the pending-lease entry,
e.g. git reset.

I do realize that this is a lot of complexity, and it has the potential
of missing some cases. However, this complexity is also the reason why I
can't build my own wrappers around pull/push to implement the feature
outside of git; alias mypull='git pull && git tag -f lease @{u}' just
doesn't cut it.


-- 
Stefan Haller
Berlin, Germany
http://www.haller-berlin.de/