2018-12-19-edition-46.markdown

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Git Rev News Edition 46 (December 19th, 2018)	default	2018-12-19 12:06:51 +0100	chriscool	news	false

Git Rev News: Edition 46 (December 19th, 2018)

Welcome to the 46th 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 November 2018.

Discussions

Reviews

• [RFC] Introduce two new commands, switch-branch and restore-paths

  Duy Nguyen sent an RFC patch to the mailing list that implemented 2 new Git commands:

  • git switch-branch which "is all about switching branches"
  • git restore-paths "for checking out paths"

  The goal is to split git checkout into different commands while not deprecating it, so that "Old timers will still use git checkout. But new people should be introduced to the new two instead."

  The idea to do that appeared following a previous patch to print something when checking out paths, though it has been considered for a long time that git checkout should not do as many different things as it currently does.

  Thomas Gummerer replied that he liked the idea and had been considering working on it. He suggested taking at look at maybe changing the behavior of the new command a bit.

  Junio Hamano, the Git maintainer, then started to discuss the naming of git restore-paths with Duy.

  Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason replied to Duy's original message asking questions about arguments accepted by git switch-branch and suggesting a comparison between the new commands and git checkout or even other source code management tools. He also discussed with Duy about eventually deprecating git checkout.

  Stefan Beller replied to Ævar and started discussing the names and syntax of the command. Junio replied to Stefan telling that he thought the names Duy suggested make sense, though checkout already makes sense and longhands starting with checkout, like checkout-branch, would make sense too.

  Duy then sent a version 2 of his initial patch that "breaks down the giant patch in v1 and starts adding some changes in these new commands". Especially the names were changed to checkout-branch and checkout-files.

  A first discussion thread started with Junio, Duy, Stefan Beller and Stefan Xenos about the name and syntax of the new commands. As no clear conclusion appeared though, Duy decided to go back towards the original names he had proposed.

  Another discussion thread among the same developers was about using "unnamed branch" instead of "detached HEAD".

  These discussions were followed by a version 3 where the names of the commands were changed back to switch-branch and restore-files instead of restore-paths.

  There were further discussions involving Elijah Newren, Junio, Duy, Ævar, Dan Fabulich, Thomas and Eric Sunshine, about a lot of related subjects, though Duy decided to wait until the release of Git 2.20 before sending an updated patch series.

Releases

• Git 2.20.1, 2.20.0, 2.20.0-rc2, 2.20.0-rc1, 2.19.2
• Git for Windows 2.20.1, 2.20.0, 2.20.0-rc2, 2.20.0-rc1, 2.20.0-rc0
• libgit2sharp 0.25.4
• GitLab 11.6RC7, 11.5.4, 11.4.11 and 11.3.13, 11.5.3, 11.4.9, 11.5.2, 11.5.1, 11.5, 11.4.7, 11.5.0-rc12, 11.4.6 and 11.3.10
• Bitbucket Server 5.16
• Gerrit Code Review 2.16.1
• GitHub Enterprise 2.15.4, 2.14.11, 2.13.17, 2.12.25, 2.15.3, 2.14.10, 2.13.16, 2.12.24

Other News

Various

• Git Contributor Summit Registration, Jan 31, 2019, Brussels
• Git Merge 2019 (Jan 31 -- Feb 01) schedule announced, including:
  • A “Git and version control in the enterprise” panel with GitHub, Atlassian, and GitLab
  • A chat with Deb Nicholson from the Software Freedom Conservancy on the future of software
  • Sessions by Google, Microsoft, and Praqma on scaling Git
  • Lighting talks on everything from version control for law to Git for games
• “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch with some assistance (via Hacker Newsletter #429)

Light reading

• Ed Thomson's Git Advent Calendar.
• Samuel Walladge explains how to use Git with (Neo)Vim on Day 6 of the Vimways Advent Calendar.
• Neil Kakkar's How not to be afraid of Git anymore.
• Will Hay Jr.'s The Architecture and History of Git: A Distributed Version Control System. See also:
  • The Git Parable, by Tom Preston-Werner (2009) - the ideas behind the architecture of Git; covered in Git Rev News #30
  • slides from "Git Chronicles" talk at GitTogether 2008 - early history
• Susan Potter's Git entry in "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" book, Volume II (2012); there is chapter on Mercurial in Volume I (2012).
• David Gohberg's The Biggest Misconception About Git, that Git is all about storing differences between files.
• Aditya Sridhar's How to become a Git expert, about amending commits and rebasing
• Large files with Git: LFS and git-annex article on LWN.net, contributed by Antoine Beaupré
• How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request article on Ars Technica, contributed by Joshua Tauberer
• Caitlin Hudon's Git Your SQL Together (with a Query Library) recommends tracking SQL queries in Git
• Eric S. Raymond's SRC, four years later, about his single-file version control system with modern UI
• Johnathan Swan's Gradually improving our code quality with Test::Perl::Critic::Progressive together with Git to catch and report new code style policy violations
• Peter Hutterer's On commit messages (2009)

Git tools and sites

• sr.ht (https://sr.ht) is a very capable software forge which is already serving the needs of many projects in the free & open source software community site. It is 100% open source software and includes goodies such as a wiki, mailing lists, ticketing, with neat features such as all the pages work without Javascript, and it is designed to support an email Git workflow. Provided hosting is available for a low cost and contributing to the software can get one credit towards hosting. It was announced in a sr.ht, the hacker's forge, now open for public alpha blog post.

• Adobe's git-server, a nodegit-based application to serve Git repositories via http:// and https://.

• Git Butler: Pull Request and Issue Workflow Automation -- an alternative to GitHub Actions (covered in Git Rev News #44), allowing to automate Git workflow by creating powerful rules with a simple visual editor

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]> with help from Johannes Schindelin, Kaartic Sivaraam and Matt Singletary.