fatal: remote error: want 08f39590d6bc1d1e7f0b09a3c17ba7b4741b66b5 not valid
fatal: internal server error
Errors during submodule fetch:
	BlueSpiceBookshelf

And again...

It meant I understood the report and appreciated you bringing it to my attention. No. I acknowledged the report because I accepted there was an issue.

Is there a reasonable use case for these repos to have force merge enabled in gerrit? Force pushing to a feature branch can be a normal thing when you are not collaborating with anyone via another clone and using a pull request workflow. That is not generally how we would expect Gerrit to be used. Force pushing to any released branch (including main) is generally a recipe for breaking all other git clones.

I can see that force push is enabled for the various users and groups across the BlueSpice repository tree in gerrit. At the https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/admin/repos/mediawiki/extensions/BlueSpice,access level @Kizule is granted force push everywhere. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/admin/repos/mediawiki/extensions/BlueSpiceBookshelf,access grants force push to the "bluespice-admin" group (@Driedmueller, @Hslater, @ItSpiderman, @Mglaser, Mschlindwein (no phab?), @Osnard). https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/admin/repos/mediawiki/extensions/BlueSpiceAvatars,access does the same.

At a more global +2 level, the config for https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/admin/repos/mediawiki,access does also allow for force pushing, but in limited circumstances. Force push is allowed to deployment branches (refs/heads/wmf/*) by the wmf-deployment group. Force push is also allowed for tags by the quite large "mediawiki" group (MediaWiki +2 rights holders).

I suggest since the issue has been acknowledged we just disable it in Gerrit config and go from there.

Thanks for the constructive feedback.

I've revoked the explicit force-push permission for Kizule.

We can also consider removing force-push permissions from the bluespice-admin group. In practice, though, this was my doing.

Over the past week I've been updating the BlueSpice repositories to bring them into line with current MediaWiki standards. The force-pushes were done within a matter of minutes. I wasn't aware of the effect this would have on mediawiki/extensions.git.

That work is now complete, and the repositories are now passing CI, so I don't expect any further force-pushes of this nature.

Thanks for raising awareness to this topic. And my apologies for the inconvenience.

We mainly develop against REL1_43 and cherry-pick our changes to master. Sometimes we have cases where we just need to adjust something (version numbers in extension.json, composer dependencies) on master. For this we have a direct push policy in the team, that allows perform such simple changes directly. Or as @Hslater explained for some cases of other maintenance. We will review this procedure.

Especially semi-automatic version bumping will require force-pushed into the repos in the future. But this usually only affects REL1_43 and custom branches, not master, so I hope that is okay.

Why does anything need force pushing?

This feels like a tooling issue on your end.

You can force merge (“submit”) via Gerrit, while we don’t actually advise it either, it won’t cause these problems for other people.

Bumping dozens or hundreds of versions in extension.json needs automation. And such cases also don't need code review. We didn't want to cause problems and will adapt our tooling. This will take some time though. I guess the way the "libraryupdater" tool does it is the way to go then?

In T431845#12148826, @Osnard wrote:

Bumping dozens or hundreds of versions in extension.json needs automation. And such cases also don't need code review. We didn't want to cause problems and will adapt our tooling. This will take some time though. I guess the way the "libraryupdater" tool does it is the way to go then?

I think you have a misconception about what force pushing is. Force pushing is pushing a commit when the current remote version is not an ancestor of the commit being pushed. See the documentation for git push --force. If an ordinary push fails, the normal solution is to rebase your commit on top of the tip of the remote branch.

Force pushing is not related to CI. If you do an ordinary push to the remote branch, CI doesn't even run. Alternatively, you can push the change to Gerrit for review, and then submit the change in Gerrit, ignoring any CI failure.