Prevent a checkout in Git

Question

I'm currently looking into managing source code from an OpenInsight application using Git. Because OI code is stored in a database table there is a certain amount of manual work to export the source to text and visa-versa.

So far I have managed to automate a lot of this work using Git hooks, but the lack of a 'pre-checkout' hook has given me a problem..

When a user switches branches I have a post-checkout hook to diff the old and new branches and store a list of the changed procedures. When the user next starts OI the changes are pulled in from the text files and compiled.. so far so good.. However, if a user was to switch branches, let say from A to B, and then switch again to C without starting OI then the source in OI will be for branch A but the diff will be between B and C.

To get around this I hoped to be able to use a pre-checkout hook to check for the existence of a file containing a list of un-compiled changes and stop the user switching branches until they were compiled in. Are there any other suggestions of ways of halting a checkout?

Answer 1

I was also looking into this recently and found a thread discussing the current (well... 2010) state of githooks

http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Why-there-is-no-pre-checkout-hook-td5638042.html

From the thread:

Óscar Fuentes wrote:
...
Because you can use your script in place of "git checkout".

Have you considered writing a script that developers can as part of their development workflow? That way you can check for the existence of the un-compiled changes list. This is basically what we ended up doing and it really helped us to simplify/standardize our workflow.