sharing secret changesets with friends

Kaz Nishimura kazssym at vx68k.org
Sun Feb 16 20:52:13 CST 2014


I thought something like a 'non-publishing push' command instead before.
The 'non-publishing push' command will abort if any draft revisions would
turn to public by pushing them to another repository.  If the remote
repository is 'non-publishing', it will work just as a normal push.  It
could be a guard against accidentally publishing unfinished draft
revisions.  What do you think?



On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Dov Feldstern <dovdevel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I like to keep changesets that are still in-development secret --
> keeping them just as draft is risky, since I find that I am wont to
> "push" without limiting what branch I'm pushing, with the result that
> I push work that is not really ready to be published (this was not so
> much of a problem with mq, since patches did not get pushed by
> default, but now that I'm switching to evolve -- which I am generally
> very happy with :) -- this is more of an issue).
>
> OTOH, keeping the changesets secret means I can't share them with
> *any* repositories, though often I would like to be able to share
> among my different non-publishing repositories (this is one of the
> main drivers for switching from mq to evolve -- that with evolve it
> should be easier to share in-progress, still-mutating, work). This is
> also similar to the questions asked at [1,2], the answers to which I
> find not very satisfying (no offense, Martin!).
>
> So, my idea is something like this: it would be nice if I could
> configure "friend" repositories -- say, by adding a "friends" key
> under the [phases] config, with the value being a list of "paths" from
> [ui]. Then, I would like any operations relative to "non-publishing
> friends" to also include secret changesets, and to not promote the
> phase of the changesets simply by virtue of this sharing.
>
> In order to play around with this, I've just created a few patches
> which add a '-F, --friend' flag to 'outgoing' and to 'push'; where, if
> set, these operations will not exclude secret csets. The patches
> actually work for me, though I've only tested two local repositories
> at the moment. And in any case, I think the interface I describe above
> (configuring friends) would be better than adding a per-command flag.
>
> But even this simple implementation has already raised some issues:
>
> 1. The pushed secret changesets get promoted to "draft" in both the
> local and remote repos. What's actually happening, I think, is that
> the csets get pushed to the remote as "draft", and then the comparison
> of the local with the remote finds that they are draft in the remote,
> and so promotes them to draft locally as well. (It was easy enough to
> prevent the promotion of the local csets, but I couldn't find where
> the promotion of the remote ones was happening; and if they get
> promoted, then preventing the promotion of the local ones is
> meaningless or downright wrong.) So, any tips on where the promotion
> of the remote changesets to "draft" is happening?
>
> 2. If the secret changesets in the remote are manually forced back to
> secret, then subsequent 'outgoing -F' shows them again as outgoing!
> This may simply be because I haven't implemented "friend" support for
> the incoming commands, yet; but regardless, it raises the question of
> what happens, under the scheme proposed above, if the "friendship"
> configuration is not symmetrical -- i.e., if repo1 defines repo2 as
> its friend, but not vice versa, then repo1 can't see repo2's secrets,
> and so secrets from repo1 will always appear to be outgoing to repo2.
> To be sure, it really only makes sense to define as friends repos over
> which you have control (either directly, or via a "real" friend that
> you are sharing with) -- so just fixing the relations to be symmetric
> should not be much of a problem; and in any case, at the worst, a
> subsequent push will attempt to push the secrets again, and then they
> don't get pushed because they already exist (mercurial outputs, e.g.,
> "added 0 changesets with 0 changes to 11 files.")
>
> 3. Just a general observation after having looked at the code a bit:
> it seems that the *current* semantics of secrets are pretty widely
> assumed, so I'm a *little* worried about being able to cover all
> edge-cases with a change like this...
>
> So --
>
> Does this idea sound interesting/useful to anyone else? And if so, any
> pointers on how to move ahead with this?
>
> Thanks!
> Dov
>
> I'll send the patches I mentioned above as a patchbomb, just for reference.
>
> [1]
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9637984/mercurial-include-secret-changesets-in-bundle/9645786#9645786
> [2]
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10029718/push-secret-changesets/17046989#17046989
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