I maintain Debian packages for several projects which are hosted on
GitHub. I have a master packaging branch containing both upstream s
code, and my
debian/ subdirectory containing the packaging control
files. When upstream makes a new release, I simply merge their
release tag into
master:
git merge 1.2.3 (after reviewing the
diff!).
Packaging things for Debian turns out to be a great way to find small
bugs that need to be fixed, and I end up forwarding a lot of patches
upstream. Since the projects are on GitHub, that means forking the
repo and submitting pull requests. So I end up with three remotes:
origin- the Debian git server
upstream- upstream s GitHub repo from which I m getting the release tags
fork- my GitHub fork of upstream s repo, where I m pushing bugfix branches
I can easily push individual branches to particular remotes. For
example, I might say
git push -u fork fix-gcc-6. However, it is
also useful to have a command that pushes everything to the places it
should be: pushes bugfix branches to
fork, my master packaging
branch to
origin, and definitely doesn t try to push anything to
upstream (recently an upstream project gave me push access because I
was sending so many patches, and then got a bit annoyed when I pushed
a series of Debian release tags to their GitHub repo by mistake).
I spent quite a lot of time reading
git-config(1) and
git-push(1),
and came to the conclusion that there is no combination of git
settings and a push command that do the right thing in all cases.
Candidates, and why they re insufficient:
git push --all- I thought about using this with the
remote.pushDefault and branch.*.pushRemote configuration options. The problem is that git push --all pushes to only one remote, and it selects it by looking at the current branch. If I ran this command for all remotes, it would push everything everywhere.
git push <remote> : for each remote- This is the matching push strategy . It will push all branches that already exist on the remote with the same name. So I thought about running this for each remote. The problem is that I typically have different master branchs on different remotes. The
fork and upstream remotes have upstream s master branch, and the origin remote has my packaging branch.
I wrote a perl script implementing
git push-all, which does the
right thing. As you will see from the description at the top of the
script, it uses
remote.pushDefault and
branch.*.pushRemote to
determine where it should push, falling back to pushing to the remote
the branch is tracking. If won t push something when all three of
these are unspecified, and more generally, it won t create new remote
branches except in the case where the branch-specific setting
branch.*.pushRemote has been specified.
Magit
makes it easy to set
remote.pushDefault and
branch.*.pushRemote.
I have this in my ~/.mrconfig:
git_push = git push-all
so that I can just run
mr push to ensure that all of my work has
been sent where it needs to be (see
myrepos).
#!/usr/bin/perl
# git-push-all -- intelligently push most branches
# Copyright (C) 2016 Sean Whitton
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at
# your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
# WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
# Prerequisites:
# The Git::Wrapper, Config::GitLike, and List::MoreUtils perl
# libraries. On a Debian system,
# apt-get install libgit-wrapper-perl libconfig-gitlike-perl \
# liblist-moreutils-perl
# Description:
# This script will try to push all your branches to the places they
# should be pushed, with --follow-tags. Specifically, for each branch,
#
# 1. If branch.pushRemote is set, push it there
#
# 2. Otherwise, if remote.pushDefault is set, push it there
#
# 3. Otherwise, if it is tracking a remote branch, push it there
#
# 4. Otherwise, exit non-zero.
#
# If a branch is tracking a remote that you cannot push to, be sure to
# set at least one of branch.pushRemote and remote.pushDefault.
use strict;
use warnings;
no warnings "experimental::smartmatch";
use Git::Wrapper;
use Config::GitLike;
use List::MoreUtils qw uniq apply ;
my $git = Git::Wrapper->new(".");
my $config = Config::GitLike->new( confname => 'config' );
$config->load_file('.git/config');
my @branches = apply s/[ \*]//g $git->branch;
my @allBranches = apply s/[ \*]//g $git->branch( all => 1 );
my $pushDefault = $config->get( key => "remote.pushDefault" );
my %pushes;
foreach my $branch ( @branches )
my $pushRemote = $config->get( key => "branch.$branch.pushRemote" );
my $tracking = $config->get( key => "branch.$branch.remote" );
if ( defined $pushRemote )
print "I: pushing $branch to $pushRemote (its pushRemote)\n";
push @ $pushes $pushRemote , $branch;
# don't push unless it already exists on the remote: this script
# avoids creating branches
elsif ( defined $pushDefault
&& "remotes/$pushDefault/$branch" ~~ @allBranches )
print "I: pushing $branch to $pushDefault (the remote.pushDefault)\n";
push @ $pushes $pushDefault , $branch;
elsif ( !defined $pushDefault && defined $tracking )
print "I: pushing $branch to $tracking (probably to its tracking branch)\n";
push @ $pushes $tracking , $branch;
else
die "E: couldn't find anywhere to push $branch";
foreach my $remote ( keys %pushes )
my @branches = @ $pushes $remote ;
system "git push --follow-tags $remote @branches";
exit 1 if ( $? != 0 );
In order to monitor some of the 
What happened in the 
