GnuCash+git development process with multiple branches?

[Derek Atkins]

On Sun, June 30, 2013 5:29 pm, John Ralls wrote:
>
> On Jun 30, 2013, at 1:38 PM, Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Last week I just upgraded my main laptop from Fedora 15 to Fedora 18.
>> One of the side effects of this change was that PERL got updates from
>> 5.12 to 5.16, and SVK (which I've been using for years) no longer
>> works.  SVK has long-since been abandoned (back in 2010) which basically
>> means I'm not being forced to switch over to git-svn.  Yay me.
>>
>> One of the things that SVK allowed me to do was to have a single copy of
>> the repository locally and then from there I could check out multiple
>> branches into different WC directories.  Whenver I wanted to pull
>> changes from the upstream server (svk sync) it would pull those changes
>> once into the central repo (on all branches, of course) and then I could
>> pull those updates into my WCs (svk update).
>>
>> I want to replicate this behavior using git/git-svn.  Part of my
>> reasoning is that if I'm working on 5 different branches I don't feel
>> like I need 5 full copies of the repo (although I doubt there is a way
>> to get git to do that).  However, more importantly, when I pull updates
>> from the upstream server I don't want to have to fetch those changes
>> independently for each checked-out branch/WC.  My reasoning for this is
>> that for some of my (non-GnuCash) work the pipe is rather thin and/or
>> behind a VPN firewall so I'd like to pull everything once and then
>> spread locally.
>>
>> So I guess this boils does to more of a general git question than
>> specifically gnucash, but ---- how do you work with multiple branches
>> simultaneously?  This is particularly important because of having to
>> dcommit back upstream.
>>
>> My first attempt was to do a git clone --bare and then figuring I could
>> git-clone from there for my branches.  It converts my 'svk sync' to a
>> 'git fetch' in the bare repo and 'svk update' to a 'git-update' (or git
>> pull) from my WCs.  Alas, this doesn' *quite* work because the git fetch
>> fails with:
>>
>> Fetching origin
>> fatal: Couldn't find remote ref HEAD
>> error: Could not fetch origin
>>
>> This is probably because refs/heads/ is empty in the bare repo?
>>
>> So what do you all do?  I'm thinking that once I figure it out I'll
>> update the GnuCash Git Wiki Page, although honestly I'm probably the
>> last dev to migrate to git :-P
>>
>
> Whew! I was afraid you were going to say that upgrading to perl 5.16 blew
> up
> git-update!
>
> I just keep one git repo and flip around the branches as needed.
>
> Left to itself, git pull will update all of the checked out branches in
> the local repo,
> but we can't let it do that because each branch needs to have its refs
> updated
> (particularly for new tags), so git-update only rebases the currently
> checked out
> branch, so you have to git-update each branch in turn. More important, you
> need
> to fetch and update between dcommits when you're working in more than one
> branch (like backporting a change) or git-svn gets all confused and you
> spend a
> bunch of time resetting it back and rebasing before it will let you
> dcommit again.
>
> None of which explains why having a local bare clone wouldn't work. In
> fact, I just
> tried it and it seems to work -- though there aren't yet any changes to
> update, it didn't
> whine about anything:
>   $ athena:/Users/john> git clone --bare
> git://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash.gitCloning into bare repository
> 'gnucash.git'...
>   remote: Counting objects: 165617, done.
>   remote: Compressing objects: 100% (27553/27553), done.
>   remote: Total 165617 (delta 137995), reused 165002 (delta 137411)
>   Receiving objects: 100% (165617/165617), 109.62 MiB | 4.63 MiB/s, done.
>   Resolving deltas: 100% (137995/137995), done.
>   $ athena:/Users/john> cd gnucash.git
>   $ athena:/Users/john/gnucash.git> git fetch
>   From git://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash
>    * branch            HEAD       -> FETCH_HEAD
>   $ athena:/Users/john/gnucash.git>
>
> I'll leave it and try again tomorrow after somebody commits something.

I should note that I cloned from code.gnucash.org, not github..  Maybe
that makes a diference due to Master vs. Trunk?  I thought Geert was going
to fix that, but maybe he didn't, yet?  Or maybe I need to?

>
> Regards,
> John Ralls

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant