idea: git push requests

This is an idea that Keith Packard told me. It's a brilliant way to reduce GitHub's growing lockin, but I don't know how to implement it. And I almost forgot about it, until I had another annoying "how do I send you a patch with this amazing git technology?" experience and woke up with my memory refreshed.

The idea is to allow anyone to git push to any anonymous git:// repository. But the objects pushed are not stored in a public part of the repository (which could be abused). Instead the receiving repository emails them off to the repository owner, in a git-am-able format.

So this is like a github pull request except it can be made on any git repository, and you don't have to go look up the obfuscated contact email address and jump through git-format-patch hoops to make it. You just commit changes to your local repository, and git push to wherever you cloned from in the first place. If the push succeeds, you know your patch is on its way for review.

Keith may have also wanted to store the objects in the repository in some way that a simple git command run there could apply them without the git-am bother on the receiving end. I forget. I think git-am would be good enough -- and including the actual diffs in the email would actually make this far superior to github pull request emails, which are maximally annoying by not doing so.

Hmm, I said I didn't know how to implement this, but I do know one way. Make the git-daemon run an arbitrary script when receiving a push request. A daemon.pushscript config setting could enable this.

The script could be something like this:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
tmprepo="$(mktemp -d)"
# this shared clone is *really* fast even for huge repositories, and uses
# only a few 100 kb of disk space!
git clone --shared --bare "$GIT_DIR" "$tmprepo"
git-receive-pack "$tmprepo"
# XXX add email sending code here.
rm -rf "$tmprepo"

Of course, this functionality could be built into the git-daemon too. I suspect a script hook and an example script in contrib/ might be an easier patch to get accepted into git though.

That may be as far as I take this idea, at least for now..