Subject: Re: Test that every revision builds before pushing changes?

From: Daniel Pittman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:10:52 +1100

Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]> writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>>
>> I would like to ensure that my commits are fully bisectable before I
>> commit them to an upstream repository, at least to the limits of an
>> automatic tool for testing them.
>>
>> 'git bisect run' is similar: it can automatically locate the breaking in
>> a test suite, for example, but that doesn't help me in the case of three
>> commits, A (good), B (bad) and C (good, fixing B).
>>
>> I would much rather, in this case, use rebase to fix B so that it, too,
>> builds before I push the changes and pollute a public repository with a
>> broken changeset — and make bisect that much harder to use in future.
>
> You can do that, but it requires manual work too. The trick is to make
> the release branch immutable on the public repository and use topic
> branches with per-developer namespaces. The per-developer namespace
> thing is actually important, as it leaves the freedom to rewind and
> recreate topics to the developers (which shared branches do not).
>
> The manual step comes at merge-time; Someone has to be responsible for
> merging all the topics that are to be included in the release branch
> and make sure it builds and passes all tests after each merge.

Ah.  You have not quite grasped what I was looking for: I was after a
tool to help automate that step, rather than a workflow around it.

For example, the responsible person for that testing could use the
hypothetical (until someone tells me where to find it):

    git test public..test make test

Which would then effectively wrap:

    for each revision between public and private:
         git checkout revision
         make test
         # report if that fails, allow fixing the commit or whatever
         # then 'git test continue' to carry on...

That turn the process from a manual one to an automated one: it runs
that command for every revision until it fails, or until they all pass.

Regards,
        Daniel