We would like to implement some automated processing of merge requests in a Gitorious instance. Everything we want to do is easy…if there were some way for us to enumerate the pending merge requests via git. I see that Gitorious actually dumps these into refs/merge-requests/nnn in the (hosted) git repository, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to get git to transfer this to a client.
I’ve looked at just screen-scraping the list of merge requests, but since we’re making extensive use of OpenID for authentication it ends up being fairly complicated (load the Gitorious login screen, submit, follow the redirect to the OpenID server, submit the login form, respond to the optional verification, follow the redirect back to Gitorious, etc…).
What we’re looking to do is create a working copy of the repository in which we will create a local branch corresponding to each merge request, and then apply the merge request in that branch. Why are we doing this? Because we’re abusing merge requests as a homework submission mechanism in a course setting.
It turns out this isn’t terribly difficult:
This gets the list of outstanding merge requests, which is mostly what I wanted. I was hoping one could close the merge request by deleting the corresponding reference, but that doesn’t work.