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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure exactly what you think a better tool would look like. By your own admission, there are multiple "right" ways to do branch management, and all of them are supported meaningfully by git. But, more or less by definition, a tool that enforced a "right" way to do things would disallow some of these.

So... I don't understand. Do you want a tool that makes the kernel branching style illegal, or one that breaks your own team's workflow? If you want one that supports both, how is that providing clarity about the "right" way to do things?

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It isn't hard to imagine a SCM tool (using GIT internally) that enforces a specific set of curated operations for a particular workflow, that teams could agree to use for a given project. You could have different such tools for different workflows on different projects.

You could even write a meta-tool that allows administrators to define and reify a workflow which would then be enforced for developers on a project.

Isn't that what all large projects are doing internally? Hell, big chunks of the git chrome (things like "git am", "git request-pull", "git send-email") is precisely an attempt to write scripts to automate core parts of the kernel workflow. Github added bits of its own, like "watching" a public repository and providing a core spot for pull requests to land, with discussion and review tools. I don't understand why you're so interested in "enforcement" when projects using these tools seem to be doing just fine.

What you're saying sounds to me a lot like the stuff we heard from Java nerds in the 90's (who certainly didn't invent it, Pascal and PL/1 nuts said much of the same stuff) -- the programming environment should be designed to force the user into a particular style. Our community has, for the most part, rejected that view in favor of dynamic systems with more flexibility. Why should SCM branch management be any different?

I think it's a balance. There is value in having people working on a given project aligned on the same basic workflow. To achieve that for a team that is currently growing or is planning to grow, you have to document what that basic workflow should look like. That "document" can be a set of social mores that are loosely enforced through complaint and argument, or an actual document somewhere, or a tool like your parent is suggesting.

Such a tool, which makes the preferred workflow very easy and excursions outside it achievable but somewhat more difficult seems like a pretty good idea to me, and not at all as stuffy and prohibitive as you seem to fear.

I don't disagree at all. But in reality, those tools exist and are all around us. What would be the value of putting that stuff into git itself? Why is it a shortcoming of git that it hasn't picked one?

You might want to look into writing hooks, perhaps? The company I work at has some simple hooks that require you to have a line stating who code reviewed your commit. Sure, it can be bypassed, but there's social pressure not to do so.

I've written my own hooks to do some automated testing on my changes, too. (I've got one that checks for trailing commas in my Javascript files, for instance.)

gerrit's permission system goes a good ways in the direction you're talking about. (Unfortunately, it's rather baroque and poorly documented.) You can specify who can submit patches, who can approve them, who can merge, whether a repository allows merges at all or requires rebasing or cherry-picking, etc.

http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flo...

https://github.com/nvie/gitflow

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