Gclient Managed Mode

Managed mode is a deprecated feature of gclient. It was conceived to give an easier workflow for newcomers to git, but turned out to be full of surprising behaviors. It has thus been deprecated, unmanaged mode is the default, and existing users of managed mode are encouraged to change to unmanaged mode.

To check which mode you are using, check .gclient (the gclient config file) and see the value of the "managed" flag. To switch to unmanaged mode from managed mode:

• edit your .gclient and set: "managed": False,
• update your repository by using git pull (as described above), followed by gclient sync, rather than just gclient sync.

To make the Blink repo also unmanaged, first fetch blink and then:

• edit your .gclient and set: "managed": False, "custom_deps": { "src/third_party/WebKit": None, },
• update your repository by using git pull in Chromium, then git pull in Blink (as described above), followed by gclient sync, rather than just gclient sync.

Reference

• “PSA: fetch chromium now uses git unmanaged mode”

The main difference between managed mode and unmanaged mode is that in managed mode, local branches track local master branch instead of origin/master, and gclient “manages” the branches so that they stay in sync. However in practice this leads to two master branches (local master and origin/master) that go out of sync and prevent further uploads/commits. With unmanaged mode you always have only one master: origin/master. The local master still exists but is not treated in any special way by the tools.

What's missing

• Safesync is not supported for new managed git checkouts yet (https://crbug.com/109191).