[petsc-dev] 'master' RESET after bad merge! - 'tisaac/thplex' was based on 'next'

[Jed Brown]

Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com> writes:
>> But this was my whole point in our process discussion. Tools should 
>> subtract
>> from what we have to worry about, not add to the cognitive load. We should
>> all be manually checking for less, not more. A good tool would prevent any
>> merges to master from a branch that was created from next. This seems like
>> the simplest requirement to me.

It's not _that_ simple to define precisely in terms of the DAG.

> Should this be possible with git hooks? I've never had occasion to use 
> them but naively, I'd want to do something like create a commit in 
> 'next' which is tagged 'NeverMergeToMaster' 

Tags suck for this because they are not supposed to change, but 'next'
is rewound after releases.  Better to use a special branch and compare
against 'origin/sentinel', but is "origin" always the name of the remote
(it's not for me)?

> and then set up a hook which will automatically reject any merge to
> master including a commit with that tag. The practicalities aren't
> clear to me, though, since as far as I can tell BitBucket doesn't give
> you direct access to hooks, which you would probably need to employ a
> strategy like this one:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13381105/git-hook-to-prevent-an-experimental-branch-pushed-to-a-release-or-master-branch

Bitbucket and GitHub do not want to be in the business of server-side
policy because everyone wants something different and implementation is
error-prone, so it would be an endless support issue for them.  We can
install hooks locally (e.g., as part of configure) if necessary, just
make sure that you run configure before merging in a repository, make
sure that the git module is loaded when you run configure so that
configure can run the git executable and correctly resolve the hooks
directory, make sure that you don't use a shared clone or other sneaky
option to have your GIT_DIR located elsewhere, don't use alternative
porcelain for making commits, and don't use the stupid Merge button on
the website.  Well, I guess that's a few caveats.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 818 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20140903/459181de/attachment.sig>