Subject: Re: Alternates and push

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2008 12:20:30 -0400

On Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 08:42:50AM -0400, Jon Smirl wrote:
> At github my repo, digispeaker, has an alternate pointing to github's
> local copy of Linus' tree. I ignored my tree for a month and then
> pushed to it including 200MB of objects from Linus' tree. These 200MB
> of objects were pushed up to the server, but these objects were
> already in the alternates repository.
> 
> What's supposed to happen? Is something broken in github's setup, or
> does pushing not take into account alternates?

Long-standing mis-feature in git's logic in deciding what to push.
It's been reported a few times, but apparently it's hard to fix, or at
least it never hsa been fixed as far as I know.

I work around it by ssh'ing into master.kernel.org and doing a "git
branch -f origin <commit-id-of-master-on-linus's-tree>".  As long as
there is one branch which is up-to-date, git will avoid pushing a huge
number of objects to master.kernel.org.  Of course, this workaround
only works if you have shell access....

						- Ted