90 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
90 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
[[!meta date="2010-03-01 13:14:48 +0000"]]
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Any wiki with a form of web-editing enabled will have to deal with
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spam. (See the [[plugins/blogspam]] plugin for one defensive tool you
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can deploy).
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If:
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* you are using ikiwiki to manage the website for a [[examples/softwaresite]]
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* you allow web-based commits, to let people correct documentation, or report
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bugs, etc.
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* the documentation is stored in the same revision control repository as your
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software
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It is undesirable to have your software's VCS history tainted by spam and spam
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clean-up commits. Here is one approach you can use to prevent this. This
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example is for the [[git]] version control system, but the principles should
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apply to others.
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## Isolate web commits to a specific branch
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Create a separate branch to contain web-originated edits (named `doc` in this
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example):
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$ git checkout -b doc
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Adjust your setup file accordingly:
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gitmaster_branch => 'doc',
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## merging good web commits into the master branch
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You will want to periodically merge legitimate web-based commits back into
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your master branch. Ensure that there is no spam in the documentation
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branch. If there is, see 'erase spam from the commit history', below, first.
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Once you are confident it's clean:
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# ensure you are on the master branch
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$ git branch
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doc
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* master
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$ git merge --ff doc
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## removing spam
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### short term
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In the short term, just revert the spammy commit.
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If the spammy commit was the top-most:
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$ git revert HEAD
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This will clean the spam out of the files, but it will leave both the spam
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commit and the revert commit in the history.
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### erase spam from the commit history
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Git allows you to rewrite your commit history. We will take advantage of this
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to eradicate spam from the history of the doc branch.
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This is a useful tool, but it is considered bad practise to rewrite the
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history of public repositories. If your software's repository is public, you
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should make it clear that the history of the `doc` branch in your repository
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is unstable.
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Once you have been spammed, use `git rebase` to remove the spam commits from
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the history. Assuming that your `doc` branch was split off from a branch
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called `master`:
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# ensure you are on the doc branch
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$ git branch
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* doc
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master
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$ git rebase --interactive master
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In your editor session, you will see a series of lines for each commit made to
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the `doc` branch since it was branched from `master` (or since the last merge
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back into `master`). Delete the lines corresponding to spammy commits, then
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save and exit your editor.
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Caveat: if there are no commits you want to keep (i.e. all the commits since
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the last merge into master are either spam or spam reverts) then `git rebase`
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will abort. Therefore, this approach only works if you have at least one
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non-spam commit to the documentation since the last merge into `master`. For
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this reason, it's best to wait until you have at least one
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commit you want merged back into the main history before doing a rebase,
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and until then, tackle spam with reverts.
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