monorepo-tools: splitting to an existing repository with signed commits

[dominikkaluza]

What is happening

It's not possible to split to an existing repository if the repository contains commits signed by GitHub (typically init commit or merge commits from pull requests).

How to reproduce:

• Crate a new repository on GitHub with Initialize this repository with a README option checked
• Build a monorepo from this repository
• Try splitting the monorepo

Result:

monorepo_split.sh fails when trying to push to this repository

Workaround:

• edit line 36 in monorepo_split.sh and change git push --tags $REMOTE master to git push --tags --force $REMOTE master (this is needed only for the first split, --force flag can be removed after that)

Expected result

monorepo_split.sh re-signs the commits and pushes them to the existing repository without using the --force flag

[vitek-rostislav]

Hi @dominikkaluza, thanks for reporting the issue. We had the same problem in the past and solved it exactly the same way as you describe - by using push --force. At least, we should probably document this behavior 🤔

monorepo_split.sh could sign the commit using the same GPG key (https://help.github.com/articles/signing-commits-using-gpg/) that is used in the original github repository but this would work only if all the commits in the original repository were signed by the key.

[PetrHeinz]

I suppose it is theoretically possible to store all data about the signature into the commit msg during building the monorepo and then use this data to recreate exactly the same signed commit during the splitting. I haven't looked into it yet, but it should be possible to store all raw data of the commit encoded in the commit msg (it's possible to store 100MiB there) and during splitting restore the exact commit...

This could be a messy and time-consuming workaround, I would suggest to just document this behavior instead (I've created a separate issue #445 for this). We could leave this issue open if someone from the community want to take a look at it.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically closed because there was no acivity within the last half a year.