Re: Please consider extending .gitignore to support setting of a file size limit

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:09 AM, Fredrik Gustafsson <iveqy@iveqy.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:54:59AM +0200, Kevin Daudt wrote:
>> My experience in #git is that people want to prevent other people
>> accidentelly adding large files, resulting in all sorts of problems,
>> which takes a lot of effort to fix if you're not an experienced user.
>
> I second this. In #git@freenode we often get people trying to reduce
> repo size since they or a collegue accidental added a huge binary file.
>
> They do a filter branch and remove that file. However then they need to
> do a forced push. And the person (the collegue) that didn't had enough
> git experience to understand why it was a mistake to add a big file, now
> ends up with having to sync with a rewritten remote.
>
> So I can really see that there's a demand for such a feature. However, I
> wonder if this shouldn't just be a pre-recieve hook?
>
> If we want to inform the user, we might just add a pre-commit hook for
> this.
>
> The problem with pre-commit hooks is distribution of them. As it is with
> making this a configuration option. There's really no good way to share
> configuration and hooks between git repos today as I know of. (Yes, I'm
> aware of this beeing a hard problem due to security concerns).
>

Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection
they said. So:

Maybe we can just distribute some good defaults (or your internal distribution
for git can ship adapted versions of the default). And instead of just running
a hook, maybe the clone/fetch could tell the client to enable these
predefined hooks.
so maybe we'd need a fetch capability "recommended-hooks" which could look like

    recommended-hooks=<name>,<sha1>

The name would indicate what hook you're interested in such as
.git/hooks/pre-commit-warn-huge-size.sample and the sha1 would be the
sha1 of that default hook to ensure nobody has tampered with that script.

I am not sure if we need the sha1, maybe that's overengineered. I mean trusting
a default script is as much as trusting the git binary on your system, isn't it?