Tag Archives: vcs

Git Feature Branches

Programming,

I’m really liking this.

So I set up some Git feature branches to help get Redmine patches from their BTS into their SVN trunk faster. (I don’t know why, but it seems to take a *very* long time for that to happen.)

Each BTS patch gets a Git feature branch. My Git repo for this project has about 21 branches in it.

So, I pull upstream into a branch called, well, upstream.

Each feature branch is created off upstream.

Then, the master branch merges all the feature branches in. I wrote a simple git-merge-fb shell script that just runs git-merge for each feature branch. Very simple. I expect to have a git-pull-fb script of some sort that merges upstream into each feature branch when I update against upstream. It could also run a diff at the end to see if there is any difference remaining, and if not, delete the branch.

It’s trivial to give an updated diff to upstream for any given patch: git diff feature-blah..upstream will do it.

I only wish gitweb had a way to do that so I could just hand out a URL that always corresponds to the latest diff against upstream for a given feature. Now that would rock.

hg.complete.org is no more

Programming, , , ,

As of today, hg.complete.org is no more. I have removed mercurial and hgwebdir from my server, removed hg from my DNS zone, and converted everything that was in Mercurial over to Git. (Except for hg-buildpackage, which I have orphaned) So there is now stuff at git.complete.org.

I still have a ton of Darcs repos to convert, which will take more time.

Also I have heard a lot of people say that the GitPlugin for Trac is not very good. I have two Trac instances running it: one for commithooks and another for ListLike. Both seem OK so far, but I haven’t pushed them very much yet.

Trac & Git

Programming, ,

For quite some time now, I’ve been running Trac over at software.complete.org. Most of my free software projects — well, the ones where I actually go to the effort to make formal releases — have a Trac instance. This Trac instance provides a wiki, bug tracker, downloads area, timeline (with RSS feeds), and VCS integration.

Trac is a nice program, but one thing has bugged me about it all this time:

Every trac instance is its own island.

I have 17 trac instances out there for my projects. To see what bugs are out there on my own server, I have to check 17 websites (or 17 RSS feeds or whatnot). Publishing a new program is not a lightweight process.

So today I started poking around looking for something better. I really like Trac’s way of integrating the wiki with the BTS and the commits; wiki markup can refer to a bug or a changeset, and bugs can use wiki markup too.

I looked at Redmine, Mantis, and Roundup, and I also have experience with RT.

Of these, Redmine looks the most interesting. Multiple projects support, per project wiki and forums, gantt charting even, and support for SVN, CVS, Mercurial, Bazaar, and Darcs — with Git support out there as patches to their development tree already too. Oh, and I saw references to a Trac importer as well. One thing that makes me nervous, though, is that they have no links to sites that use Redmine (except one in the news section), and Google isn’t turning up users either. Does nobody use this thing?

What else should I be looking at?

Over on the Git side, I’m still liking Git. I have now migrated several Mercurial projects over to git (see git.complete.org). I am also playing with Darcs to git migration using darcs2git, which also is going well. Sometimes gitk shows a nicer representation of a Git repo converted from Darcs than I was able to get from Darcs.

Experimenting with Git

Programming,

I’ve been writing about Git a bit lately.

I’ve decided to switch some of my Debian work over to it to start with, as well as some of my other projects.

Although I was thoroughly frustrated with Git a year ago, now I am quite pleased with it. What’s different? The documentation is a LOT better. So far I have only found one manpage (git-show) that omits lots of its options. The system is friendlier, keystroke-happier, and powerful.

Compared to Mercurial, I’ve found some nice things:

In-directory branching. I didn’t expect to care about this, since both git and hg permit lightweight clones. But it turns out to be so easy to use that it is great. Especially since I don’t have to setup multiple branch repos on the server. I really like this. Note that “hg branch” is not the same as a git branch, and see the discussion on the hg lists about renaming that before 1.0.0 for why.

Flexibility in getting things around. Plain HTTP works fine (no static-http:// hack). ssh. git daemon. rsync. Very slick.

Performance. Surprisingly, git actually feels faster than Mercurial, especially when pushing or pulling. I didn’t expect that.

Tags. They seem smarter in git. No more merging of .hgtags all the time. Also I like that I can attach a message to a tag and sign it.

All that power. There is a *lot* that Git can do. I should have been taking notes about it all.

My main complaint is still that Git doesn’t have something as nice as “darcs send”. Mercurial doesn’t either, but it’s a bit closer. Git has moved closer, but still has room to improve on that.

So I have set up git.complete.org and am starting to publish my Debian stuff on Debian’s alioth server as well.

Also, hg-fast-export in the fast-export project is *awesome*. Branch-aware and everything. It made a perfect Git version of my Mercurial work.

Revisiting Git and Mercurial

Software, , ,

Exactly one year ago today, I wrote about Git, Mercurial, and Bzr. I have long been interested in VCS, and looked at the three main DVCS systems back then.

A Quick Review

Mercurial was, and for the moment, remains, my main VCS. Bzr remains really uninteresting; I don’t see it offering anything compelling that Mercurial or Git can’t do. My Git gripes mainly revolved around its interface and documentation. Also, I do have Windows people using my software, and need a plausible solution for them, even though I personally do no development on that platform.

Ted Tso wrote his own article in reply to mine, noting that the Git community had identified many of the same things I had ans was working on them.

I followed up to Ted with:

… So if Ted’s right, and a year from now git is easier to use, better documented, more featureful, and runs well on Windows, it won’t be that hard to switch over and preserve history. Ted’s the sort of person that usually is right, so maybe I should starting looking at hg2git right now.

So I guess that means it’s time to start looking at Git again.

This is rather rambly, I know. It’s late and I want to get these thoughts down before going to sleep…

Looking at Git

I started at the Git wikipedia page for an overview of the software. It linked to two Google Tech Talks about Git: one by Linus Torvalds and another by Randal Schwartz. Of the two, I found Linus’ more entertaining and Randal’s more informative. Linus’ point that CVS is fundamentally broken, and that SVN trying to be “a better CVS” (an early goal of svn, at least) means it too is fundamentally broken, strikes me as quite sound.

One other interesting tidbit I picked up is that git can show you where functions have moved from one file to another, thanks to its rename-detection heuristic. That sounds really sweet, and is the best reason I’ve yet heard for Git’s stubborn refusal to track renames.

The Landscape

I’ve been following Mercurial and Darcs somewhat, and not paying much attention to Git. Mercurial has been adding small features, and is nearing version 1.0. Darcs has completed a major overhaul both of its repository format and internal algorithms and is nearing version 2.0, and appears to have finally killed the doppleganger (aka conflict spinlock) bug for good.

Git, meanwhile, seems to have made strides in usability and documentation in its 1.5.x versions.

One thing particularly interesting to me is: what projects are using the different VCSs. High-profile projects now using Mercurial include OpenSolaris, OpenJDK (Java 7), and Mozilla’s projects. Git has, of course, the Linux kernel. It also has just about everything associated with freedesktop.org, including X. Also a ton of Unixy stuff.

Both Mercurial and Git communities are working on TortoiseHg/TortoiseGit types of GUIs for Windows users. Git appears to have a sane Windows port now as well, putting it on pretty much even footing with Mercurial and Darcs there. However, I didn’t spot anything with obvious Windows ties in the Git “what projects use git” pages.

The greater speed of Mercurial and Git — even for pushing and pulling small patches — likely will keep me away from Darcs for the moment.

Onwards…

As time allows (I do have other things keeping me busy), I plan to install git and work through some tutorials and try to use it in practice as much as possible, to get a good feel for it.

Future

It is beneficial to be using a VCS that is popular, though that is certainly not a major criterion for me. I refuse to use SVN because its lack of distributed functionality makes it too unproductive to be useful. But it looks like Git is gaining a lot of traction these days, especially in Debian circles, which also makes it more interesting.

I notice that Ted did convert e2fsprogs over to git as he said he might, incidentally.