Re: git: how to figure out with a script what the last commit on remote repo is without fetching it

[lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de>]

Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> writes:

> I've been thinking about how to answer your question properly and I realised
> that the answer probably depends on which protocol you are using to pull from
> the remote repo. Or more properly, which protocols the remote repo supports.

One is using git:, the other one https:.  I don't know if they support
other protocols.  One of them is on github (https), the other one is the
emacs repo (git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git).

> If it is listening as pure git://, or git+ssh://, then (at least in the latter
> case) it is probably running git-shell(1), and so if you can construct a
> command that git-shell will accept and will spit out the answer you need, you
> may be able to invoke it over ssh. ('ssh remotehost git-shell some-command...')

I don't have ssh access to any of the remote hosts.  Both repos, I can
only clone/fetch/merge from.

> If it's listening as HTTPS, then you need to fetch something like
> 'refs/heads/master' under the URI and see whether the resulting sha1 hash
> corresponds to one in your local repo.
>
> I might play around with this more Tomorrow.

But I don't want to fetch?  If I can fetch only the data (a minimal
amount of data) I need to figure out if the remote is more recent,
that's ok, though.


-- 
Knowledge is volatile and fluid.  Software is power.