Branch dependencies with Git hooks

[martin f krafft]

Dear list,

I had this idea today while sitting with Guido and studying TopGit.
I have no investigated any of this, but since DebConf is coming to
an end and I won't have much time in the weeks to come, I wanted to
make sure to capture the idea.

TopGit manages dependencies between branches. If B is a branch off
A, and A is a branch off upstream, then TopGit helps you update all
branches in the right order if upstream releases a new version.

Let's say we have a way to store branch dependencies (quite possibly
that information is right there in the DAG). Couldn't we conceive of
a hook of some sort that made sure that updates to dependent
branches result in (controlled) merges/updates of the depending
branches?

Obviously, we do not want to kick off a massive merging massacre
for every new upstream commit, but we may well want to do this for
the packaging branch. And we certainly want to update all feature
branches when we merge a new upstream tag (or something like that).

The hook would therefore trigger under a certain condition (e.g.
a tag, or a special commit message) and recursively update all
depending branches.

I hope I managed to capture the idea enough for us to have
a discussion about this.

Cheers,

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o>      Related projects:
: :'  :  proud Debian developer               http://debiansystem.info
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck    http://vcs-pkg.org
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
"if you are going to run a rinky-dink distro made by a couple of
 volunteers, why not run a rinky-dink distro made by a lot of
 volunteers?"
                                                    -- jaldhar h. vyas
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