25 Setting up a publicly accessible repo

You only need to read this section if you are able to host a publicly accessible repo somewhere.

Getting everything set up is really very easy. I think you’ll be quite surprised if you haven’t done this sort of thing before. In the examples below I’m assuming that you have shell access to your remote host via ssh…

user@localhost ~ $ ssh user@your.host
user@host ~ $ mkdir -v sxemacs
user@host ~ $ cd !$
user@host ~/sxemacs $ git init --bare
user@host ~/sxemacs $ echo Your Name's SXEmacs Repo > description
user@host ~/sxemacs $ exit
user@localhost ~ $ git clone http://git.sxemacs.org/sxemacs
user@localhost ~ $ cd sxemacs
user@localhost ~/sxemacs $ contrib/git-for-steve.sh

And that’s it! Told you it was easy, didn’t I? All you have to do now is push your local copy to your remote…

git push myremote master

25.1 Automation

The last two commands for patch submission listed in See Patch Submission, format-patch and send-email are fairly long and hairy. You’d no doubt have trouble remembering them. But, never fear, git has a few tricks up her sleeve to make your life easier.

25.1.1 Automating with Hooks

If you are lucky enough to NOT be using github⁷ to host your publicly accessible repo you can set up a post-receive hook to automatically send your pull requests to the SXEmacs mailing list when you push to it.

25.1.2 Setting Up The post-receive Hook

Remember: This hook runs from your publicly accessible repo (your remote), and NOT from your local working directory. It is called after you push to your remote.

Jump over to your remote now and follow these steps

1. Take a look in the file hooks/post-receive.sample. At the bottom of that file there is a commented line, that when uncommented would call another script, post-receive-email. Check that the path is correct, and uncomment it.
2. Rename hooks/post-receive.sample to hooks/post-receive
3. Tweak the remote’s config with…

   git config hooks.mailinglist \
       "SXEmacs Patches <sxemacs-patches@sxemacs.org>"
   git config hooks.envelopesender "Your Name <your@email>"
   git config hooks.emailprefix "[P-Req] "
   git config hooks.showrev "git show -C %s; echo"
   

4. echo "Your Name's SXEmacs Repo" > description

Take note that the SXEmacs mailing lists will funnel any post from non-subscribers into the moderation queue. So make sure that the address you set hooks.envelopesender to is subscribed to the patches list.

Also be aware that using this post-receive hook will mean that every time you push to your publicly accessible repo, a message will be sent to sxemacs-patches; this includes instances where you merely are pulling the latest from mainline and mirroring. Hence, the use of aliases as discussed below may be preferable. We are looking into ways of avoiding this sort of annoyance.

25.1.3 Automating with Aliases

Git allows you to define aliases that will let you do all kinds of funky things. Remember those hairy format-patch and send-email commands?

git config alias.sxe-fp 'format-patch --add-header="X-Git-Repo: REPO-URL" \
    --subject-prefix="P-Req" --numbered'

git config alias.sxe-sm 'send-email \
    --to="SXEmacs Patches <sxemacs-patches@sxemacs.org>" \
    --from="$(git config user.name) <$(git config user.email)>"'

With those 2 aliases set you can get your pull requests in by doing…

git sxe-fp -o DIR origin && git sxe-sm DIR

25.1.4 Making Life Even Easier with git config

You can make your life even easier by having git store things in its config. In this case, you can store those format-patch and send-email command line options in the repo’s config…

git config format.headers "X-Git-Repo: YOUR-REMOTE-URL"
git config format.subjectprefix "P-Req"
git config format.numbered true

git config sendemail.to \
    "SXEmacs Patches <sxemacs-patches@sxemacs.org>"
git config sendemail.from "Your Name <your@email>"

With those settings, the commands: git format-patch -o DIR origin, and git send-email DIR are now equivalent of the original long hairy ones mentioned further up.

Be careful when setting up aliases and config settings that you only make them global if you absolutely have to. All the ones I’ve shown here have been repo-specific.

The git-for-steve.sh script in our contrib directory is an easy (and recommended) way to set up your git repo. It’ll make sure that you have everything set up correctly and in an optimal way.