Re: publishing a forked^W cloned directory with ancestry

also sprach J. Bruce Fields [off-list ref] [2007.08.30.2149 +0200]:

Maybe the one extra "git remote add ...; git remote fetch" isn't
such a big deal?

[...]

Sure, each of those could add a "linus" branch that tracked
upstream, so I could still get some idea what Linus's tree was
even if I didn't happen to already have it.  But then I'd end up
with 4 different slightly-out-of-date pointers to the head of
linus's repo in each of those trees, which would end up being just
be a bunch of cruft that I'd have to ignore whenever I looked at
them.

Thanks to you and everyone else who replied! I spent some time off
computers and still found myself thinking about this as I was hiking
around woods and mountains and in the end, it's perfectly obvious:

I am trying to make it easy for third parties to contribute to my
git-managed project and I (somewhat rightfully) assumed that
I needed to shield my poor contributors from git's complex
tentacles. In doing so, I find myself going backwards and turning
git into something svn-like, thus losing much of its power.

The solution is clear: maintain only my Debian branch on
git.debian.org and expect those cloning it to add the upstream
remote themselves in true distributed manners. A concise file in the
project root with instructions is a nice add-on.



also sprach Bart Trojanowski [off-list ref] [2007.08.30.2227 +0200]:

Now when you 'git push debian' it will populate the 'upstream' and
'master' branches properly.

When someone clones your repo, they will get origin/master (your
branch) and origin/upstream (the official mdadm branch).

This is the solution I had stuck in my head for the longest time
(after you proposed it), but I eventually discard it for one simple
reason: the danger that someone pushes to the upstream branch and
thus diverges it from the real upstream is just too high and would
result in a pretty nasty mess, as far as I can tell.

Did I understand the problem correctly?

I think you did. And thanks for that. I hope my reasoning above also
makes sense.

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
  \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
 
"the surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in
 higher esteem those who think alike than those who think
 differently."
                                              -- friedrich nietzsche
 
spamtraps: madduck.bogus@madduck.net