2018-01-17-edition-35.markdown

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Git Rev News Edition 35 (January 17th, 2018)	default	2018-01-17 12:06:51 +0100	chriscool	news	false

Git Rev News: Edition 35 (January 17th, 2018)

Welcome to the 35th edition of Git Rev News, a digest of all things Git. For our goals, the archives, the way we work, and how to contribute or to subscribe, see the Git Rev News page on git.github.io.

This edition covers what happened during the month of December 2017.

Discussions

Support

• Need help migrating workflow from svn to git

Josef Wolf first described his current workflow which uses Subversion (SVN).

Josef has a number of machines that all have a working copy of the same repository in a specific directory. A cron job updates the working copies and then run scripts contained in the working copies.

When using svn update to update those copies, the changes made locally on the machines are automatically merged with the upstream changes, usually without conflicts.

Then Josef explained what would happen with Git:

With git, by contrast, this won't work. Git will refuse to pull anything as long as there are ANY local modifications. The cron job would need to

git stash
git pull
git stash pop

But this will temporarily remove my local modifications. If I happen to do a test run at this time, the test run would NOT contain the local modifications which I was about to test.

Randall S. Becker suggested using git fetch instead of git pull to be able to first tell if changes from upstream have to be applied to the local copy, and also using a branch for each machine to better track local changes and merge them with upstream changes.

Josef replied to Randall by asking for a way to "properly check whether a merge is actually needed" as it looks like git status or git diff are not very well suited for that purpose.

Igor Djordjevic, alias Buga, wondered about the possibility, in the original workflow, of running scripts that are being worked on. Buga also said that using git stash would probably have other issues, so he suggested the "(scripted) creation of a temporary branch at fetched remote branch position, and using something like git checkout --merge <temp_branch> to merge ... local modifications to latest changes fetched from remote".

In a later email Buga alternatively suggested "using git worktree add <temp_copy_path> to create a temporary working tree ... alongside a temporary branch" and deleting those after having committed, merged and pushed the local changes made there.

Josef replied to Buga that some potential issues Buga worried about are not relevant when using SVN because of the specifics of his work, while others are indeed relevant when using Git.

About the solutions Buga had suggested, Josef and Buga started to discuss them, but at this point Junio Hamano, the Git maintainer, suggested using just:

git fetch <remote> <branch>
git checkout -m -B <master> FETCH_HEAD

with:

<remote> <branch>: the branch at the remote you are pulling from
<master>: whatever branch you are using

After some tests and further discussion, Josef agreed that this was a good solution. Buga also suggested using git add -u and git reset after or before the above commands to avoid failures in case the script runs many times and there are conflicts.

Releases

• Git v2.16.0-rc2
• Git v2.16.0-rc1
• Git v2.16.0-rc0
• Git for Windows v2.16.0-rc2
• GitHub Enterprise 2.12.2, 2.11.8, 2.10.14 and 2.9.19
• GitLab 10.3 and then 10.3.1, 10.3.2 and 10.3.3
• Bitbucket Server 5.7

Other News

Various

• Git London User Group: 16 January 2018: Edward Thomson announces the formation of the Git London User Group and their first meeting on 16 January 2018.

Light reading

• Federico Kauffman blogs about using git hooks to improve your day-to-day workflow.
• A short post for Emacs users who want to narrow the author column in Magit.
• Master the Rebase (and the Other Way Around) by Anthony Seure introduces rebase both as an alternative to merge and as a history rewriting tool.
• A security write-up on Git and escape sequences by Ariel Zelivansky.
• Dan Palmer explains how and why they teach non-engineers to use GitHub at Thread.

Git tools and sites

• GitPlex is a tool to "browse code in git repository like in IDE".
• FAC, a command line tool to fix merge conflicts, has been discussed on Hacker News.
• Git exercises helps you "learn and practice Git" with exercises to "rapidly become a Git Master". It has also been discussed on Hacker News.
• git-dissect: DIStributed biSECT is "an alternative to git bisect that allows running tests on multiple hosts in order to bisect faster".
• git-pisect: Parallel regression finder is "an alternative to git bisect run that uses multiple concurrent tests to try to finish a bisect more quickly", with an explanatory blog post.
• go-git v4 was announced. go-git is "a highly extensible Git implementation in pure Go".
• Real-world Git is an hour-long video free course on Git basics.

Credits

This edition of Git Rev News was curated by Christian Couder <[email protected]>, Jakub Narębski <[email protected]>, Markus Jansen <[email protected]> and Gabriel Alcaras <[email protected]>.