Re: backup or mirror a repository

On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 23:27 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

You can almost do it with

	git push --all $remote

except there is no way to automagically remove the branch you
removed from the local repository.  For that, we would need a
new --mirror option to "git-push".

Yup! I actually was looking for such a thing in the git-push man page,
but was unsuccessful. I was living with git-push --all for a little
while before I thought I'd ask. Unfortunately, the preferred setup
(having the backup machine actively perform fetch and prune) is not very
nice for me due to firewalls.

I think it is trivial to do for native transports, as we first
get the list of all refs from the remote side before starting
the transfer.  You need to change the last parameter called
'all' to remote.c::match_refs() into an enum ('push_all' being
one of choices), introduce another enum 'push_mirror', and teach
it to "match" the remote (i.e. dst) ref that does not have
corresponding entry on our side (i.e. src) with an empty object
name to mark it removed.  Then the part marked as "Finally, tell
the other end!"  in send-pack.c::send_pack() will take care of
the actual removal.

I should have a look, but if someone else wants to work on this they
shouldn't block on me: work already made me get hit by a bus on one
project (luckily I wasn't important), and the storm is not over.

Thanks,
fdr