{section:  Executive summary}

The public git repositories served up on {link: http://condor-git.cs.wisc.edu gitweb} are maintained by a simple script, called =git-mirror.rb=.  This script pulls all heads matching certain patterns from the internal repository.  By default, branches fitting the following criteria will be mirrored:

1: the master branch (=master=),
1: standard nightly build tags, of the form =YYYY-M[M]-D[D][_X*]=,
1: branches whose names end with =-publicbranch=,
1: nightly build tags that end with =-publicbranch= and a build date,
1: release tags, and
1: explicitly whitelisted branches (currently =V7_5-dcloud-branch= and =V7_1-procd_osg-branch=)

{section:  Frequently-asked questions}

*Where is all of this stuff?*  See =pinguino:/scratch.2/git= for the scripts and the gitweb installation.

*How often does this thing run?*  The old shell-script version ran once every twenty minutes as a cron job.  The new Ruby version pulls all matching branches, sleeps for thirty seconds, and then runs itself again; it uses cron essentially as a watchdog.  (That is, at most one mirror job targeting a given destination repository will run at a time.)

*When should I expect to see my changes to a mirrored branch reflected in the public repository?*  A pull shouldn't take more than five minutes, so the worst-case scenario for the new mirror script is probably under ten minutes.  (The real worst-case scenario involves waiting for the cron job to restart =git-mirror.rb=, but your average wait time in that case should still be under fifteen minutes.)

*How can I tell if my (sensitive) branch will be mirrored to the public repository?*  You can run =git-mirror.rb= yourself on your personal repo with the =--dry-run= option, and it will show you the list of branches and tags it would have pushed, given the default options.

*How can I tell if my (non-sensitive) branch will be mirrored to the public repository?*  Push it to the main internal repo and wait for at most fifteen minutes.

*How can I recognize an additional set of branch or tag names to be mirrored to the public repository?*  The first question to ask yourself is "do I really need to do this?"  Unless you're dealing with something inflexible that expects a certain kind of branch or tag name, it's better to use a name that already fits one of the existing patterns.  However, it's easy to make the script recognize additional patterns:  simply specify the additional pattern as a command-line argument to =git-mirror.rb= in the crontab entry:  use =-p REGEX= to specify that head names matching =REGEX= should be pushed or =-w NAME= to add =NAME= to the name whitelist.

*What else can I do with this script?*  Glad you asked!  Run =git-mirror.rb --help= for more details.