Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> On 4/11/2012 2:57, Warp wrote:
> >    Who thought this would be a good idea?

> On the other hand, it prevents you from having to check out the entire 
> repository just to get one project.

  Shouldn't different projects go into different branches?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 13/04/2012 09:46 AM, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> On 4/11/2012 2:57, Warp wrote:
>>>     Who thought this would be a good idea?
>
>> On the other hand, it prevents you from having to check out the entire
>> repository just to get one project.
>
>    Shouldn't different projects go into different branches?

Depends on your SCM I suppose.

I know that, for example, GHC is managed as several interrelated 
projects. GHC is a Haskell compiler written in Haskell, and as such 
depends on the Haskell standard libraries, which are separate from the 
actual compiler. The test suite is also a separate project. But all of 
these projects live in the same source tree, so you can actually build 
the compiler...

What it means is that you can, for example, update the test suite, 
independent of any particular compiler version. Or if there's a 
performance improvement to one of the standard libraries, you can 
rebuild the compiler with that, without actually changing the compiler. 
Stuff like that.

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On 4/13/2012 1:36, Invisible wrote:
> That's what I'm saying - option #1 deletes the commit AND REVERTS THE
> WORKING COPY. I can't fathom why you'd want to revert your working copy.

Because you realized (say) that you've just made a change and a commit on 
the wrong repository? If it's not the behavior you want, don't use that 
option. :-)

> Except that every single time I look at the history tree, this dangling
> commit shows up,

That's kind of odd. I don't think commits with no pointers to them should be 
showing up. But if it bothers you, git gc it.  I suspect netbeans is what's 
at fault here, not git.

> I made a trivial mistake. It just surprises me that it's this long and
> complex to undo such a simple and common mistake.

You made a simple mistake committing code changes to a repository 
potentially shared with the entire world. :-)  That's not a small mistake in 
the grand scheme of things, and certainly worthy of requiring two entire 
command lines to entirely eliminate.

> Darcs also names changes after their hash. The Darcs amend command also
> changes the commit name. It's just that Darcs automatically deletes the old,
> incorrect commit, and keeps only the new, corrected one. Isn't that what
> "amending" something would be expected to mean?

So does git. Maybe it's netbeans screwing things up.

> Heck, I generally don't even worry about consistent states. Not, as in,
> whether the project is runnable.

Generally, one is expected to not commit broken code. That's like one of the 
fundamental no-no's of repositories. I guess you don't have coworkers tho. 
Just so you know.

> I work in whole logical changes. Like, I
> group all the changes to do with X together, all the changes to do with Y
> together, and so on. It might be that you need to apply X, Y and Z to get
> back to a runnable state again. But it's more that if I'm in the middle of
> editing and I screw it up, I want to be able to back out just the thing I'm
> trying to edit, not the whole of X, Y and Z and start over.

Sure. But if logical change X can be broken into 4 separate steps, each of 
which leaves you with a working system, why not commit in even smaller 
steps?  Why not commit the code to add records to the database, *then* 
commit the UI that invokes that code? Then if you utterly screw up the UI, 
you don't have to revert the database code.

> No. This still requires you to manually edit the files to the right point.

No. Really. It doesn't. Heck, you can even do it from the command line.

http://book.git-scm.com/4_interactive_adding.html

If you prefer the GUI, try this:

http://nathanj.github.com/gitguide/images/11.png

See the "unstage hunk" and "unstage lines"? There's also "stage hunk" and 
"unstage hunk".

(Parent URL: http://nathanj.github.com/gitguide/tour.html )

Again, you're being borked by netbeans. Remember that git commits whatever 
is in staging, without looking at your working copy. And it's not 
remembering where diffs came from and such. So if this really was a feature 
you needed, it would be trivial to add at the client end, and thus likely 
would have been added already. Deciding what changes get committed and what 
don't isn't part of git per se. It's just part of the front end. If you 
wanted to write a program to commit any different lines with the letter X in 
them, you could write that code pretty trivially.

> It's not like you can edit the staging copy.

It really is.

> Actually, NetBeans seems to have its own internal history tracking, so in a
> sense, it /can/. You can find the lines you changed, hit "revert change", do
> your commit, and then jab Undo a few times to redo the changes. It's klunky
> and hard, but it's better than just Git by itself.

No, it really isn't. It's harder than just git-via-netbeans by itself, 
apparently.

>> You're doing it wrong.
> Or rather, "Git isn't really supporting my workflow".

What workflow are you trying to do? Submit only some of the changed 
hunks/lines in a commit without submitting the others? Trust me - I do this 
all the time. It's trivial. When I've finished a feature, I go thru the 
git-gui to mark all the bugfixes, and commit them in separate commits, then 
mark each feature and commit them. I tend to get something working and then 
turn it into 5 or 6 commits.

>> You never made the change before where both pieces of code are in the
>> same file.
>
> I meant more that of you change one file on one branch, and an unrelated
> file on another branch, to get those changes together, you need to record a
> new commit. Even through there's no new changes, another than both files
> being in the same branch now.

So, there's no change, other than just this one change? Right, got it. ;-)

> (I'm still trying to figure out how to get gitk to resize so I can see the
> whole history tree. There doesn't seem to be a way to enlarge the tiny tree
> view at the top and shrink the enormous commit viewer at the bottom which I
> don't care about...)

Given it's in Tk, I'm assuming you grab the bar and drag it down, like any 
other pane in Tk or Windows or X. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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On 4/13/2012 1:46, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> On 4/11/2012 2:57, Warp wrote:
>>>     Who thought this would be a good idea?
>
>> On the other hand, it prevents you from having to check out the entire
>> repository just to get one project.
>
>    Shouldn't different projects go into different branches?

You mean different repositories? Yes, you can do it that way, but then you 
have to deal with people checking out branches in different places.

E.g., if I have a GUI for some code, and the back end, (or the kernel and a 
bunch of drivers,) I might want to have them both in the same tree because 
they make references to files via relative paths, but I might want to be 
able to compile the back end without compiling the GUI.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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On 4/13/2012 1:07, Invisible wrote:
> If I do this with Git branches, then on branch B, a file named X suddenly
> shows up, but there's no record that it was actually copied from branch A.

Sure there is. Otherwise, if you update X and push it, git won't know what 
to push. Now, yes, if you copy just one file without actually copying the 
commit from A, then you're not going to know the file came from A. But 
that's the case if you stick the file on a USB stick and copy it that way 
too.  Answer: don't do that. Copy commits, not individual files.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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> Answer: don't do that. Copy commits, not individual files.

How do you actually do that?

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>> Except that every single time I look at the history tree, this dangling
>> commit shows up,
>
> That's kind of odd. I don't think commits with no pointers to them
> should be showing up. But if it bothers you, git gc it. I suspect
> netbeans is what's at fault here, not git.

No, NetBeans won't show you a tree *at all*. It won't show you any 
remotely useful information about the state of your Git repo. All it 
shows is the names of the branches and the hash each one points to.

The dangling branch shows up in gitk though.

>> I made a trivial mistake. It just surprises me that it's this long and
>> complex to undo such a simple and common mistake.
>
> You made a simple mistake committing code changes to a repository
> potentially shared with the entire world. :-) That's not a small mistake
> in the grand scheme of things, and certainly worthy of requiring two
> entire command lines to entirely eliminate.

IF the change has already been shared with the world, then yes, that's 
not going to be easy to fix at all. But I haven't - that's the point. 
I'm used to it being trivial to fix mistakes that you haven't shared yet.

>> Heck, I generally don't even worry about consistent states. Not, as in,
>> whether the project is runnable.
>
> Generally, one is expected to not commit broken code. That's like one of
> the fundamental no-no's of repositories. I guess you don't have
> coworkers tho. Just so you know.

So if adding a new feature means performing a major refactor of the 
entire codebase, you're supposed to do that as one giant commit?

> Sure. But if logical change X can be broken into 4 separate steps, each
> of which leaves you with a working system, why not commit in even
> smaller steps?

More to the point, if what you need to do involves making a major 
breaking change in step 1, and not fixing the last of the things it 
breaks until step 25, are you really going to put all 25 steps into a 
single giant commit?

Like I said, I generally work in terms of points in time that I'm likely 
to want to go back to, rather than points in time where the code 
compiles. (If I did the latter, the entire project history would be, 
like, 3 giant commits with nothing inbetween!)

>> No. This still requires you to manually edit the files to the right
>> point.
>
> No. Really. It doesn't. Heck, you can even do it from the command line.
>
> http://book.git-scm.com/4_interactive_adding.html

Ah, so there *is* an interactive diff mode, it's just hidden?

> Again, you're being borked by netbeans.

Yeah, it's not the best. Then again, it appears to support Mercurial and 
Subversion as well, so maybe the problem is that it tries to handle them 
all the same way...

> Remember that git commits
> whatever is in staging, without looking at your working copy.

Sure. But if you want to record a particular version of that file, you 
still need to generate it somehow. Git only allows you to stage the 
current working copy of each file - or so I thought.

>> It's not like you can edit the staging copy.
>
> It really is.

Really? And how exactly do you do that? Does Git even store the staged 
copy as a flat file, or is it a compressed image somewhere?

>>> You're doing it wrong.
>> Or rather, "Git isn't really supporting my workflow".
>
> What workflow are you trying to do? Submit only some of the changed
> hunks/lines in a commit without submitting the others? Trust me - I do
> this all the time. It's trivial.

As in "so trivial that I can't figure out how to do it"? :-P

> So, there's no change, other than just this one change? Right, got it. ;-)

With Git, moving a change from one branch to another is itself a change. 
With Darcs, it is not.

>> (I'm still trying to figure out how to get gitk to resize so I can see
>> the
>> whole history tree. There doesn't seem to be a way to enlarge the tiny
>> tree
>> view at the top and shrink the enormous commit viewer at the bottom
>> which I
>> don't care about...)
>
> Given it's in Tk, I'm assuming you grab the bar and drag it down, like
> any other pane in Tk or Windows or X. :-)

Yeah, you'd *think* that would work... but alas, no.

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On 4/16/2012 1:24, Invisible wrote:

> The dangling branch shows up in gitk though.

Are you sure it's dangling? There's no head pointing to it at all?

> IF the change has already been shared with the world, then yes, that's not
> going to be easy to fix at all. But I haven't - that's the point. I'm used
> to it being trivial to fix mistakes that you haven't shared yet.

So, it's two command lines instead of one. Not exactly "trivial" but far 
from "difficult". And of course it'll go away on its own if you just leave 
it, so yeah, pretty trivial I'd say. Certainly "trivial" for anyone writing 
a sufficiently complex system that git is helpful.

>> Generally, one is expected to not commit broken code. That's like one of
>> the fundamental no-no's of repositories. I guess you don't have
>> coworkers tho. Just so you know.
>
> So if adding a new feature means performing a major refactor of the entire
> codebase, you're supposed to do that as one giant commit?

Nope. First, you refactor, bit by bit, with a commit for each refactor. Then 
you add the new feature. Give an example, and I'd tell you where I'd split 
it up.

>> Sure. But if logical change X can be broken into 4 separate steps, each
>> of which leaves you with a working system, why not commit in even
>> smaller steps?
>
> More to the point, if what you need to do involves making a major breaking
> change in step 1, and not fixing the last of the things it breaks until step
> 25, are you really going to put all 25 steps into a single giant commit?

Yes. If the system doesn't compile, you don't commit it. Otherwise, you've 
broken everyone who is supposed to be working on the code except yourself.

It's not really 25 steps if it doesn't compile in the middle, is it?

> Like I said, I generally work in terms of points in time that I'm likely to
> want to go back to, rather than points in time where the code compiles. (If
> I did the latter, the entire project history would be, like, 3 giant commits
> with nothing inbetween!)

Like *I* said, this doesn't fly when you're actually working on a team.

>> http://book.git-scm.com/4_interactive_adding.html
> Ah, so there *is* an interactive diff mode, it's just hidden?

If by "hidden" you mean "interactive commit" in google taking you to the 
official documentation telling you how to do it, yes.

>> Again, you're being borked by netbeans.
>
> Yeah, it's not the best. Then again, it appears to support Mercurial and
> Subversion as well, so maybe the problem is that it tries to handle them all
> the same way...

That's my suspicion.

>> Remember that git commits
>> whatever is in staging, without looking at your working copy.
>
> Sure. But if you want to record a particular version of that file, you still
> need to generate it somehow. Git only allows you to stage the current
> working copy of each file - or so I thought.

It lets you stage whatever you want. You can put files into the repository 
that don't exist anywhere outside the repository.

>>> It's not like you can edit the staging copy.
>>
>> It really is.
>
> Really? And how exactly do you do that? Does Git even store the staged copy
> as a flat file, or is it a compressed image somewhere?

It's a file in the repository. The "staging" directory is essentially a 
head. If you look at the lowest level commands, the way git works is it 
creates a blob for each file as you stage it, then creates the appropriate 
trees, then when you commit, all it's really doing is creating the commit 
blob. A commit doesn't actually add any files per se to the repository.

>>>> You're doing it wrong.
>>> Or rather, "Git isn't really supporting my workflow".
>>
>> What workflow are you trying to do? Submit only some of the changed
>> hunks/lines in a commit without submitting the others? Trust me - I do
>> this all the time. It's trivial.
>
> As in "so trivial that I can't figure out how to do it"? :-P

If you use the right interface, it's trivial. If you go through an interface 
that also works with svn (which doesn't let you commit files not in the 
working directory), then it'll be less trivial.

>> So, there's no change, other than just this one change? Right, got it. ;-)
>
> With Git, moving a change from one branch to another is itself a change.
> With Darcs, it is not.

Darcs only has one branch per repository anyway, yes?

>> Given it's in Tk, I'm assuming you grab the bar and drag it down, like
>> any other pane in Tk or Windows or X. :-)
>
> Yeah, you'd *think* that would work... but alas, no.

Huh. Maybe grab it on the little square? I don't remember.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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On 4/16/2012 1:18, Invisible wrote:
>> Answer: don't do that. Copy commits, not individual files.
>
> How do you actually do that?

The commands are "pull" and "push" I believe. Look for something talking 
about say "origin/head" in the book. Or, even better, read that book. It'll 
take you about 20 minutes, and then you'll know how git works.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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On 16/04/2012 06:07 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/16/2012 1:24, Invisible wrote:
>
>> The dangling branch shows up in gitk though.
>
> Are you sure it's dangling? There's no head pointing to it at all?

Pretty sure. You want a screenshot?

>> IF the change has already been shared with the world, then yes, that's
>> not
>> going to be easy to fix at all. But I haven't - that's the point. I'm
>> used
>> to it being trivial to fix mistakes that you haven't shared yet.
>
> So, it's two command lines instead of one. Not exactly "trivial" but far
> from "difficult". And of course it'll go away on its own if you just
> leave it, so yeah, pretty trivial I'd say. Certainly "trivial" for
> anyone writing a sufficiently complex system that git is helpful.

The whole point is, I've got a commit that's labelled as the wrong 
thing. That's confusing. Making even /more/ commits just makes things 
more confusing. Now I've got two commits containing the same stuff but 
with different names and labels. I was trying to make it /less/ 
confusing, not /more/...

>> So if adding a new feature means performing a major refactor of the
>> entire codebase, you're supposed to do that as one giant commit?
>
> Nope. First, you refactor, bit by bit, with a commit for each refactor.
> Then you add the new feature. Give an example, and I'd tell you where
> I'd split it up.

OK. So suppose that I have a class, and to use it you're supposed to 
call the methods A(), B() and C(), in that order. And then I decide 
"hey, actually that doesn't work so great", and I change it to that you 
have to call A(), then X(), and then Z(), and the type signature for A() 
is now different.

I've now broken all 16 subclasses, which I'll now have to refactor to 
juggle the existing code into the new locations. In some cases, I'll 
have to actually change the fundamental way the logic works. (That's the 
entire point of the refactor, after all.) And I've also broken all 25 
clients of these classes, which will also need to be rearranged if not 
completely rewritten.

So... /how/ do I do this without making the project not compile while 
I'm fixing all these dozens of broken classes?

>> are you really going to put all 25 steps into a single giant commit?
>
> Yes. If the system doesn't compile, you don't commit it. Otherwise,
> you've broken everyone who is supposed to be working on the code except
> yourself.

...which is why you don't push any changes until you've finished /all/ 
of them?

> Like *I* said, this doesn't fly when you're actually working on a team.

Well, obviously I'm never going to be in that situation, am I? (Let's 
face it, nobody's going to hire /me/ to write code...)

>>> http://book.git-scm.com/4_interactive_adding.html
>> Ah, so there *is* an interactive diff mode, it's just hidden?
>
> If by "hidden" you mean "interactive commit" in google taking you to the
> official documentation telling you how to do it, yes.

I did spend some time playing with this. I couldn't figure out for the 
life of me how to make it work. Git doesn't appear to behave the way the 
examples say it does. (E.g., selecting a menu item doesn't change the 
command prompt.)

Fortunately, the Git GUI seems to work. For reasons I don't comprehend, 
if you change any file, by default /all/ the changes in that file are 
considered to be "one hunk", so you have to select line-by-line which 
changes you want. Which is kind of tedious if you want to select the 25 
consecutive lines in the middle of the files without the 2 lines you 
changed right at the bottom. But hey, it works.

I guess the real solution is to never make more than one edit at once.

(Oh, and I was trying this under Linux today. Unfortunately, hitting the 
"edit" button trapped me inside Vi...)

>>> Again, you're being borked by netbeans.
>>
>> Yeah, it's not the best. Then again, it appears to support Mercurial and
>> Subversion as well, so maybe the problem is that it tries to handle
>> them all
>> the same way...
>
> That's my suspicion.

I gather a few people use Mercurial too. Maybe I'll have a look at that 
sometime... Don't think I'll bother with Subversion though. Warp's sold 
it to me.

>>>> Or rather, "Git isn't really supporting my workflow".
>>>
>>> What workflow are you trying to do? Submit only some of the changed
>>> hunks/lines in a commit without submitting the others? Trust me - I do
>>> this all the time. It's trivial.
>>
>> As in "so trivial that I can't figure out how to do it"? :-P
>
> If you use the right interface, it's trivial. If you go through an
> interface that also works with svn (which doesn't let you commit files
> not in the working directory), then it'll be less trivial.

Even talking to Git directly from the command line, it's very far from 
trivial.

>> With Git, moving a change from one branch to another is itself a change.
>> With Darcs, it is not.
>
> Darcs only has one branch per repository anyway, yes?

Yeah. So to move a change from one "branch" to another, really you're 
just copying a changeset from one repository to another.

I will admit, having multiple branches per repository is much more 
convenient.

>>> Given it's in Tk, I'm assuming you grab the bar and drag it down, like
>>> any other pane in Tk or Windows or X. :-)
>>
>> Yeah, you'd *think* that would work... but alas, no.
>
> Huh. Maybe grab it on the little square? I don't remember.

I managed to figure it out. You can't grab the /edge/ of the divider; 
that doesn't work. But if you point at the gab between the text box in 
the left and the bottom below it, you can drag that. In other words, the 
edges aren't draggable, but some random pixel in the middle of the 
tangle of boxes and buttons /is/, and it drags the whole lot with it. 
Obviously. I mean, why did't I think of that before? :-P

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