Hmmm... I guess we'll have to ask someone in infra if they have a solution. Either fetch refs/branch-heads all the time, mark the repo in DEPS as needing resf/branch-heads to be fetched, or fetch some other refs (like refs/chromium/** ) all the time (but which doesn't exist for most repos).
After taking a look, it appears only the branch builders pass --with_branch_heads . As a result, the normal builders don't even fetch tags, which is somewhat concerning.
In theory this would work if this were an actual branch being built by a branch builder. However, that's not much comfort to know that it 'should' work, when we really want to know and have tested that it is going to work when we need it in a pinch. As far as I know there are no trybots for branches, so there's no way to test anything.
Alright, we now have https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/ which is mirroring harfbuzz refs/tags/* to refs/tags/* and refs/heads/* to refs/heads/upstream/* . Members of the harfbuzz-committers group should be able to push to any refs outside of refs/heads/upstream/* .
I'd recommend limiting ourselves to refs/heads/chromium/* (pushing to branches named something like chromium/m66 ), but I think we can push anywhere. Since all of these refs a branches (under refs/heads) they will get fetched by all the bots, so we won't have to do anything fancy.
Comment 1 by drott@chromium.org
, Feb 26 2018