Skip to main content

The Foolproof Git Setup

A confused Git user.
There was a recent complaint on Git User mailing list. Quote:
Why do I have to be a source control engineer just to be a software developer?
Now, the main issue of this poor person is that his organization has failed to on-board him into his job. They told him to use Git, but didn't give him the means to do so productively (as far as we know, anyway).

What I started wondering was: Could his employer somehow have set up Git for him so that he could work with it just as easily as with Subversion?

Given a prepared .gitconfig with all the aliases and configurations that you wanted, could you really dumb down Git so much that it would be analogous to the simpleness of SVN?

Well, here's my take on it: To a certain degree: yes. If you could narrow down Git to do the most typical two SVN commands:
  • update (pull without merging), and
  • commit (with push)
.. that would help a lot.

Dumbing down pull

The first step would be to make git pull as stupid as an svn update - always rebase local commits on top of the ones being fetched:

git config --global pull.rebase true

The above setup has a weakness though. If pull-rebase runs into a conflict, even if there is only one local commit to rebase -  you get stuck in rebase mode and you have to start figuring out what Git wants you to do. This is what it looks like (and I can see why newcomers still find Git scary when I look at this):

  ~/temp/bar/[master]>git pull
remote: Counting objects: 5, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From /Users/tfnico/temp/foo
   24b3b7f..4705398  master     -> origin/master
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: A random commit message: makeshiftness
Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
M readme.txt
Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...
Auto-merging readme.txt
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in readme.txt
Failed to merge in the changes.
Patch failed at 0001 A random commit message: makeshiftness
The copy of the patch that failed is found in:
   /Users/tfnico/temp/bar/.git/rebase-apply/patch

 When you have resolved this problem, run "git rebase --continue".
If you prefer to skip this patch, run "git rebase --skip" instead.
To check out the original branch and stop rebasing, run "git rebase --abort".

That's a lot of text for one little conflict.

While SVN will present all conflicts at once, Git will insist you handle them one commit at a time, which is nicer, but still enters you into rebase-mode where you have to go git rebase --continue when conflicts have been resolved.

So, until I can figure out a way around that, you'll have to teach your newcomer at least enough to be able to resolve conflicts, do git add <resolved file> and git rebase --continue.

OR, we go back to the drawing board.

There must be a better way

I realized this after trying to publish this blog-post, and by the time I realized it hadn't gone live, I had a better idea.

What if we just squash all local commits into being changes in the work tree?

We could make an alias: git update - which does the following

  1. git reset --soft origin/master
  2. git stash
  3. git pull
  4. git stash pop
This would essentially guarantee that any conflicts occur after we pop the stash. This is essentially the same behavior as SVN update. Here's the alias:

git config alias.update "!git reset --soft origin/master && git stash && git pull && git stash pop"

Of course this would mean that we lose the commit messages of any local commits, but that wouldn't be a problem if we also implemented the next step:

Some very pushy commits


Next up, I would imitate svn commit by automatically pushing after each commit by configuring up this post-commit hook (in .git/hooks/post-commit):

#!/bin/sh
git push

Voila. Every commit is immediately pushed away, and if there are remote changes, you have to update first. Just like in SVN.

(I know SVN will allow you to commit anyway if there are no conflicts, but I don't think that's a good idea. We could actually script our way into this too, by detecting the rejection, doing an update, and then commit again with the same commit message unless there are any conflicts.).

That's it

These two adaptions would actually go a long way, until the user wants to get into stuff like branching, and by that time he should be ready to learn to use Git properly anyway.

We could maybe alias git add to git resolve. We could also maybe wrap Git in a script and somehow capture the output messages to make them more readable and SVN-like. In the end, I guess there's also a limit to how much energy we should put into making training wheels for people..

Oh, on a final note, there's an old related project called EasyGit. They wrap Git itself and provide a smoother experience for people coming from SVN. They're not as hardline as my two adaptions above though.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...
6 comments
Read more

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...
1 comment
Read more

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config...
Post a Comment
Read more