Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Nobody's yet commented on... what is it you can do to force push to ~180 different git repos at once?

Normally, it would be difficult to do this even if you tried, no? 180 repos would usually be in a 180 different clone directories; what can you do that somehow force pushes them all at once, even ones you didn't mean to be working on at all?

In the thread, the person who made the mistake seems to suggest[1] it has something to do with a 'gerrit replication plug-in'? I am not familiar with gerrit. Anyone?

Mistakes will happen; but for a mistake to have this level of consequence took amplification, apparently by the 'gerrit replication plugin'? I'd be inclined to blame that software, rather than human error (or github permissions or lack thereof! If you have write access to a bunch of repos, of course you can mess them all up, no github permissions will ultimately change that. The curious thing remains how you manage to mess up a couple hundred of them in one click).

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/jenkinsci-dev/-myjRIPcVwU/v8...

> If you have write access to a bunch of repos, of course you can mess them all up, no github permissions will ultimately change that.

This is simply not the case. Force pushing is literally the only operation you can do via git protocols that have a destructive effect on the remote repo. Moreover, it is generally considered best a practice never to force push public branches. Thus, preventing forced pushes on branches that are considered public would, in fact, prevent any sort of real destruction to a repo. People could still push new garbage to it, but they can't make old history inaccessible.

Deleting a branch is also a destructive operation last time I checked. Force push could also be implemented by deleting the branch and pushing a different SHA1 into the same name.

Yes, that's true. Protecting a branch from deletion would be another nice feature and could be tied to denying forced pushes. Both can be construed as the branch being "public".

The default branch is already protected from deletion. They just need to add the option to also reject force pushes.

Disabling force push is a hack. Git does not track branch history, that a branch points to something that can somehow be merged to a branch you have is formalized nowhere. Branches don't have hashes, they're just strings that point to commits.

You make it sound like force pushing is some sort of special operation, but it's actually just the same operation that's made with every commit. A branch is deleted, and then a new branch is made with that same name pointing to a new commit. It's just that with a normal push there's a check to see if there's a path from the previous HEAD to the new HEAD.

And another thing, it's also not directly destructive, the unreferenced commits don't immediately disappear. They just get cleaned up when git decides it's time for garbage removal. You can still check the commits out, if you know their sha.

`git submodule foreach` is capable using git alone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com