The git-shell is a restricted shell maintained by the git developers and is meant to be used as the upstream peer in a git remote session over a ssh tunnel. The basic idea behind this shell is to restrict the allowed commands in a ssh session to the ones required by git which are as follows:
git-receive-pack
Receives repository updates from the client.
git-upload-pack
Pushes repository updates to the client.
git-upload-archive
Pushes a repository archive to the client.
Besides those built-in commands, an administrator can also provide it’s own commands via shell scripts or other executable files. As those are typically completely custom, this post will concentrate on the built-in ones.
The current trend of social coding finally arrived at ERNW! From now on, you will find our public released tools and scripts commonly on https://github.com/ernw. Therefore I would like to share some thoughts/guidelines which you have to keep in mind if you want to be a social coder:
Github and other repository hosts are great if you want to share opensource tools with the community, as they will find a common platform with defined workflows to extend/fix the work to get better software for everyone. What some should note is that (especially in terms of decentralized version control systems (DVCSs) like git, bazaar or mercurial) public really means public. Back in earlier days, if you shared your code with others you probably created a source code package of a defined version of your code. They will get the files you published, nothing more (and nothing less). Beginning with websites like sourceforge, a broader range of public VCSs came up (mostly driven by CVS or SVN). At this time, others were able to view your commit history (if you granted access to them) and all your mistakes you’ve done before your published code state (for example accidentally committed sensitive data). Those mistakes can still happen today. The difference with the DVCS used nowadays is that most of the time you have lesser control of your commit history (in the same way if someone had copied your history commit by commit in SVN, but then you may had noticed it because of the high network traffic). With DVCS, everyone gets a full copy (clone) of your repository even on a simple “checkout” (as called in SVN). This means he/she is able to search your history locally and has all the time he/she needs to do it. Even if you delete your repository (or modify the history), the original state is shared over all who have cloned it beforehand (thats one reason why DMCA takedowns are not that powerful/useful against git repositories). Most of the public hosting platforms even included a search over all repositories (which is really useful if you want to find some tool or try to find the reason why a local tool doesn’t work).