Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-p4.py: Make submit working on bare repository

From: Amadeusz Żołnowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2016 20:56:32 +0000

Hi Luke,

Luke Diamand <[email-masked]> writes:
> I'm guessing that the reason for using a bare repo is so that changes
> can be pushed to it from several different git repos. This then saves
> doing the initial git-p4 clone multiple times.

I have created a Git repository acting as a bridge between Perforce and
pure Git repos. Changes pushed to master branch on this bridge repo get
submitted to Perforce repository (referenced via remote p4/master).

> If this had actually worked, I think the next thing I would want to do
> is to rebase one or more branches in the bare repo against p4/master.
> I don't think there's any way that git-p4 can work out which branches
> would be rebased, and nor should it.

It actually has all information needed. It submits commits from a given
branch to a branch specified with --branch option (or default p4
remote). When submitting from a non-bare repo git-p4 has the same set of
information: the current branch and a branch specified with --branch (or
default p4 remote).

> I think the approach of using a submitFromBare config variable to
> force the user to make a choice feels a bit bogus, since they clearly
> *want* to submit from this bare repo, as otherwise they wouldn't have
> done "git-p4 submit" in the first place.

I agree, a good point.

> It might make sense to have a command-line or config option
> ("--skip-rebase" ?) to tell "submit" to only do the submit part, and
> skip the rebase stage (and get the rebase stage to give a more useful
> error message on a bare repo when the option isn't used). That would
> then mean that git-p4 does not have to know if it's running in a bare
> repo or not, and the submit-without-rebase functionality is available
> to people doing other different things not involving bare repos (which
> we haven't though of yet) but still requiring submit without rebase.

While having additional --skip-rebase is a good idea, having git-p4
doing rebase would be more elegant for those who actually use GitP4 in
bare repository. In message [email-masked] I have
described how state of branches changes during submit. It clearly shows
that in case of a bare repository it ends up in undesired state.

To simplify things, why not just update ref during submit from bare
repository? As you have pointed out, if user invokes submit in this
context he/she actually wants to submit from bare repo and probably
knows what he/she is doing - especially if he/she reads man page. (-:

Kind regards,

-- 
Amadeusz Żołnowski