Moving from svn to git

Ghworg — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:20:26 +0000

I’ve spent most of the evening trying to figure out how to use git. For a long time I’ve wanted to have the repositories for some of my personal projects available on the web. For a time I was allowing external access to my apache internal apache server, but I’m wary about that because I’m not confident about my ability to secure a box.

I was planning on setting subversion up on my web host, but I didn’t want to depend completely on that and mirroring subversion is non-trivial. So today I decided to have a go at git, which is much more suited to this sort of thing.

Thankfully there is svn import capability built in to git, so converting my guinea-pig project over was a doddle. Much more tricky was setting up all the syncing between the repos. I think I have the magic incantations down now though.

git remote add NAME URL
git config branch.master.remote NAME
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

I understand the first line, the other two seem to be necessary, but I don’t know exactly what they do yet.

Also, it is better to run git pull than git push when dealing with a destination that has checked out files as push doesn’t update them whilst pull does.

One thing that is a little weird is I can’t push changes from the live site to the public repo, which is on the same server. But I can pull the changes down to my local machine then push back up to the public. Tried a couple of different ways but all failed for one reason of another.

Treating the other repo as local throws up permissions issues,

error: unable to create temporary sha1 filename

File exists

, due to the way webdav is setup on dreamhost. Treating it as remote (http) doesn’t work because the binary is compiled without curl support. Still, the round-trip method works well enough.

I also installed gitweb and pointed it at the publicly accessable repo, this was very easy contrary to all the web pages I read about it. Just name the config file gitweb_config.perl and tell it where to look for the git repos and away it went .

http://git.trollgod.org.uk/ is now available for anyone to view.

Home in subversion

Ghworg — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:15:16 +0000

I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve started putting my /home in subversion. I thought I’d go into how I handle things, as it takes a little adjustment in your thinking to get maximum benefit from this. I used this guide to get me started, and stuck pretty close to it.

What I do is seperate settings files into two groups, common and local (I don’t have any other data in home, that all lives on it’s own partition). Local settings are unique to each machine. Common settings are identical across all the machines the programs are used on. There are a few special cases that live in both worlds, like bash, but I’ll get to how I handle those later.

Each machine on my network has it’s own branch in the svn repo, and in each of those branches are two extra dirs, called “.svncommon” and “.svnlocal”. Inside these there are category dirs like “Bash”, “Devel”, “Internet” etc. that allow me to group together the settings for programs to make management easier. The .svnlocal one is not really necessary, I could just keep all the settings for the local group in the root of home instead of having them in .svnlocal and symlinks to those files in home but I like the symmetry of handling local files the same way as common ones.

Anyway, the category dirs in the common group are setup to use the svn:externals feature, so that they are actually connected to dirs in the trunk of the repo. So the files in ~/.svncommon/Devel are actually located in /trunk/Devel in the repo.

Here is the basic procedure I use to add a new machine to the shared setup (I assume the repo exists already).

First we need to add a branch for the new machine “svn mkdir svn://server/Repo/branches/MACHINE“
Then link the homedir to that branch so we can add the files “svn co svn://server/Repo/branches/MACHINE .“
Create the two dirs for the local and common files “svn mkdir .svnlocal .svncommon“
Setup the links to the common stuff”svn propedit svn:externals .svncommon”
Bash/ svn://$REPO/trunk/Bash GuiInternet/ svn://$REPO/trunk/GuiInternet Internet/ svn://$REPO/trunk/Internet Devel/ svn://$REPO/trunk/Devel
“svn ci .“
“svn up“

To add stuff to the repository you simply move it into one of the subdirs of .svnlocal or .svncommon. Then create a symlink to it in ~/ so the program can still access the file. Then “svn add” both the file and the symlink.

The Troll-Range » svn

Moving from svn to git

Home in subversion