Monday, September 21, 2015¶

Hamza and I are learning how to collaborate via Git.

Hamza has forked both Lino and Lino Così, has started a branch “New_lino_design” in Lino and another branch “New_cosi_design” in Così. When he had almost finished working on #520, he commited and pushed to his fork.

I made a clone of both forks. To my surprise I could not see any branches:

$ git branch
* master

That’s because they are remote branches. I must use -a to see them all:

$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/New_lino_design
  remotes/origin/master

How can I activate a remote tracking branch? I mean just to play around, review his code and try the test suite. I tried this:

$ git checkout remotes/origin/New_lino_design

My next surprise was that Git now said:

Note: checking out 'remotes/origin/New_lino_design'.

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental
changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this
state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.

If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:

  git checkout -b new_branch_name

HEAD is now at 6e8763a... (Hamza's commit message)

And git status warns me about this ‘detached HEAD’ state:

$ git status
HEAD detached at origin/New_lino_design
nothing to commit, working directory clean

What does this mean? Answer: a remote tracking branch is read-only, i.e. Git will not let me do commits here.

I go back to the master branch:

$ git checkout master

And then I do this:

$ git merge origin/New_lino_design

Now I remain in my local master branch (the only one I might use for commits) and merge Hamza’s work into it. Hm… but that’s not what I want here. Actually I want to have a read-only state.

fetch : get all commits from remotes. Don’t modify my working directory.
merge : change local files so that they reflect a given branch
pull : fetch followed by merge. The Git tutorial recommends to use fetch and merge explicitly as the magic of pull can be confusing.

More thoughts. Currently I needed to create a virtualenv for Hamza and to activate it. Wouldn’t it be easier to just add Hamza’s fork as a remote to my repositories? Let’s try!

But before trying, I’ll commit two local changes which I had been doing (again hoping that Hamza will be able to merge them without problems):

a minor docstring edit in docs/dev/install.rst
I removed docs/tutorials/pisa/pisa.Person-1.pdf and added it to .gitignore (because this file is being generated each time the test suite is run, see lino_book.projects.pisa, and thus should not be included to the repository).

For the first time after years of fab ci I write a commit message myself:

$ git commit -m'two minor changes'
$ git push

My problem with commit messages is that I often happen to do several things at once. As in the above example. Yes they recommend to avoid doing several things at once. And I even agree… at some degree. But in real life (or at least in my real life) it does happen that problems are intertwined. I find it more clear to write a single daily blog entry which gives a comprehensive overview of what I did that day… I am open to ideas here, but will probably continue to use my fab ci as long as nobody explains me what’s bad about it.

So I did again some changes while Hamza has the ticket. I’ll now simulate what Hamza needs to do to get these changes. First he must configure the “upstream” lino repository a remote:

$ git remote add upstream https://gitlab.com/lino-framework/lino.git

Now I imagine that he has meanwhile in his New_lino_design branch. For example he has modified the lino/setup_info.py. Now he asks Git to fetch changes from upstream:

$ git fetch upstream
remote: Counting objects: 5, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1/1), done.
remote: Total 5 (delta 4), reused 5 (delta 4), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (5/5), done.
From https://gitlab.com/lino-framework/lino
 * [new branch]      master     -> upstream/master

Then he would tell Git to merge them into his current branch:

$ git merge upstream/master
Removing docs/tutorials/pisa/pisa.Person-1.pdf
error: cannot run emacclient: No such file or directory
error: unable to start editor 'emacclient'
Not committing merge; use 'git commit' to complete the merge.

Oops, I had a typo in my .gitconfig. So I’d like to undo the above operation. Yes I want to not store this step in history:

$ git log
$ git reset --hard 6e8763a01f8f1a202dcc39e355af235c7a9dcdc4

No Hamza would do:

$ git merge upstream/master
Removing docs/tutorials/pisa/pisa.Person-1.pdf
Waiting for Emacs...
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 docs/tutorials/pisa/pisa.Person-1.pdf | 134 ----------------------------------
 1 file changed, 134 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 docs/tutorials/pisa/pisa.Person-1.pdf

This would fire up his editor and let him enter a commit message:

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/master'

# Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary,
# especially if it merges an updated upstream into a topic branch.
#
# Lines starting with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts
# the commit.

He needs to write a message because a merge is a commit. (Why?)

Now I go to my Lino repository and do:

$ git remote add hamza https://github.com/HamZuS/lino.git
$ git fetch hamza
remote: Counting objects: 84, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (31/31), done.
remote: Total 84 (delta 43), reused 32 (delta 32), pack-reused 21
Unpacking objects: 100% (84/84), done.
From https://github.com/HamZuS/lino
 * [new branch]      New_lino_design -> hamza/New_lino_design
 * [new branch]      master     -> hamza/master
Auto packing the repository for optimum performance. You may also
run "git gc" manually. See "git help gc" for more information.
Counting objects: 12762, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (12382/12382), done.
Writing objects: 100% (12762/12762), done.
Total 12762 (delta 7754), reused 0 (delta 0)
Checking connectivity: 121842, done.

That seems nice. Now I can see Hamza’s branch and can simply activate it:

$ git checkout New_lino_design
Branch New_lino_design set up to track remote branch New_lino_design from hamza.
Switched to a new branch 'New_lino_design'
$ git status
On branch New_lino_design
Your branch is up-to-date with 'hamza/New_lino_design'.
nothing to commit, working directory clean