openATTIC (Posts about git)

Clean up and split your branch with git

Stephan Mueller — Tue, 02 May 2017 09:12:05 GMT

There are several reasons why you may need completely refactor your working branch. The most common one is that you stumbled upon some things you fixed along your way resolving an issue. Your branch will grow over time until you are finished. Now you want to submit your code. You have to split it up into digestible pieces and maybe have to rewrite some WIP commits you made. Luckily we are using git! With git you can do it with a few commands with a safety belt on!

Branch Name Reorganisation

Lenz Grimmer — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 16:32:49 GMT

Now that we've concluded our migration to git, we also made some changes to our branch naming scheme.

In the Mercurial age, we had two main branches:

development: the active development branch, used by developers to derive their feature branches from and which was used as the target branch for pull requests.
default: the branch that nightly release builds and official releases were built from. This branch was updated by merging development into default by Jenkins jobs that performed a wide range of automatic tests against the development branch. Only if these tests had passed, an automatic merge to the default was performed.

During the conversion from Mercurial to git, the default branch was automatically renamed to master, which is the canonical name for the "main" repository branch in git. For most open source projects, the master branch resembles the current line of development, similar to how we used the development branch in Mercurial.

Use Nikola from a developer point of view

Volker Theile — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 09:01:35 GMT

If you want to create or modify a oA blog post, then this short introduction will show you how to do this without the need to read howto's about Nikola. You will be able to setup a virtual environment within seconds to avoid polluting your Python installation and your Git repository on your development system.

openATTIC code repository migrated to git

Lenz Grimmer — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 13:16:20 GMT

From the very beginning, the openATTIC source code repository was managed using the Mercurial distributed source control management tool.

Our code is hosted on BitBucket which provides for a tight integration with our public Jira issue tracker.

Unfortunately, Mercurial is somewhat less flexible than git when it comes to using branches to separate ongoing development work (which is a workflow encouraged by using Jira/BitBucket) - there is a tight relationship between branch names across repositories and it's impossible to delete branches once they have been created or merged. Sure, we could have probably used Mercurial bookmarks for this, but they are not well supported by the Jira and BitBucket workflows we are using (and are more designed to be used locally, not across multiple repositories).

In addition to that, we have a growing developer/contributor base that simply is more familiar with git than Mercurial nowadays. Switching to git could potentially help us attracting a bigger number of developers.

These were the main reasons for our decision to convert. Thankfully, with the help of the fast-export utility, the actual conversion was straightforward and painless. It automatically renamed the former default branch to master, to be conforming to established git practices. We will revisit the branch naming conventions in a following step.

There was some cleanup work involved afterwards, to remove all the obsolete branches that were created by Mercurial when merging pull requests.

Additionally, all pending pull requests from the previous Mercurial repo had to be re-created, but that provided us with a good opportunity to clean up the commit history before submitting them. Going forward, we intend to also make use of the more advanced features of git like rebasing or squashing change sets, to have a cleaner revision history with less noise.

We're now in the process of updating our documentation and build scripts to support this change, but this should not take us too long to resolve.

Moved this blog to git and BitBucket

Lenz Grimmer — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 09:09:43 GMT

This blog is built a static web site, powered and managed by the excellent Nikola static web site generator.

The motivation for using a static blog was to make writing articles more straightforward for our developers, without introducing unnecessary media breaks and barriers. Using this framework, one can contribute content using familiar tools and workflows.

When we initially created this blog in September 2015, we used Mercurial for managing the source files and assets and hosted the repository on an internal Mercurial host.

This has now been changed - we moved the source code repository to BitBucket, as part of the openATTIC umbrella project.

We also converted the repository from Mercurial to git along the way, primarily as an exercise to evaluate how easy such a conversation can be performed, but also as a first step to give us a way to practice our git skills and to further open up our development processes.

The conversion was performed on a local development system using the hg-fast-export Python script and was quite simple, following the steps outlined in the README.md file:

$ mkdir openatticblog.git
$ cd openatticblog.git
$ git init
$ ../fast-export/hg-fast-export.py -r ../openatticblog.hg

Afterwards, the git repo could easily be pushed to BitBucket.

BTW, if you take a closer look at this repo, you will notice there's a branch named website. This is a work in progress project to convert the existing openattic.org web site from Typo3 to Nikola.

While the content is shaping up nicely, the layout and design still needs some more attention before we will make the switch. If you're familiar with creating web sites using Nikola and Bootstrap and want to give us a hand, please let us know!