Group items tagged

Taking Control of Your Local Workflow

Git means never having to say, “you should have”

The big problem here is models.rb - it’s “tangled” in the sense that it includes modifications from two different logical changes. I need to tease these changes apart into two separate commits, somehow. This is the type of situation that occurs fairly regularly (to me, at least) and that very few VCS’s are capable of helping out with. We’ll call it, “The Tangled Working Copy Problem.”

Git is quite different in this regard. You can work on five separate logical changes in your working copy — without interacting with the VCS at all — and then build up a series of commits in one fell swoop. Or, you can take the opposite extreme and commit really frequently and mindlessly, returning later to rearrange commits, annotate log messages, squash commits together, tease them apart, or rip stuff out completely. It’s up to you, really. Git doesn’t have an opinion on the matter.

I've personally settled into a development style where coding and interacting with version control are distinctly separate activities. I no longer find myself constantly weaving in and out due to the finicky workflow rules demanded by the VCS. When I'm coding, I'm coding. Period. Version control – out of my head. When I feel the need to organize code into logical pieces and write about it, I switch into version control mode and go at it. I'm not saying this is the Right Way to use Git: in the end, it all goes to the same place. I'm saying that this is the way I seem naturally inclined to develop software, and Git is the first VCS I've used that accommodates the style.

The Index is also sometimes referred to as The Staging Area, which makes for a much better conceptual label in this case. I tend to think of it as the next patch: you build it up interactively with changes from your working copy and can later review and revise it. When you're happy with what you have lined up in the staging area, which basically amounts to a diff, you commit it. And because your commits are no longer bound directly to what’s in your working copy, you're free to stage individual pieces on a file-by-file, hunk-by-hunk basis. Once you've wrapped your head around it, this seemingly simple and poorly named layer of goo between your working copy and the next commit can have some really magnificent implications on the way you develop software.

We want to commit all of the changes to synchronize-bookmarks and some of the changes to models.rb, so let’s add them to the staging area:

add bin/synchronize-bookmarks

add --patch models.rb

tage this hunk [y/n/a/d/j/J/?]?

Stage this hunk [y/n/a/d/j/J/?]?

I run into The Tangled Working Copy Problem so often that I've devised a manual process for dealing with it under VCS’s that punt on the problem. For instance, if I were using Subversion, I might go at it like this:

The magic is in the --patch argument to git-add(1). This instructs Git to display all changes to the files specified on a hunk-by-hunk basis and lets you choose one of the following options for each hunk: y – stage this hunk _n_ – do not stage this hunk _a_ – stage this and all the remaining hunks in the file _d_ – do not stage this hunk nor any of the remaining hunks in the file _j_ – leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk _J_ – leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk _k_ – leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk _K_ – leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk _s_ – split the current hunk into smaller hunks

I like to review that the changes in the staging area match my expectations before committing: $ git diff --cached [diff of changes in staging area]

I also like to verify that my unstaged / working copy changes are as I expect: $ git diff [diff of changes in working copy that are not in the staging area]

Everything looks good, so I commit the staged changes: $ git commit -m "fix bookmark sucking problems"

git add --patch is actually a shortcut to features in git add --interactive, a powerful front-end for managing all aspects of the staging area. The git-add(1) manual page is a treasure trove of worthwhile information that’s often passed over due to the traditional semantics of VCS “add” commands. Remember that git-add(1) does a lot more than just add stuff – it’s your interface for modifying the staging area.

git commit --amend takes the changes staged in the index and squashes them into the previous commit. This lets you fix a problem with the last commit, which is almost always where you see the technique prescribed, but it also opens up the option of a commit-heavy workflow where you continuously revise and annotate whatever it is you're working on. See the git-commit(1) manual page for more on this.

And then there’s git rebase --interactive, which is a bit like git commit --amend hopped up on acid and holding a chainsaw – completely insane and quite dangerous but capable of exposing entirely new states of mind. Here you can edit, squash, reorder, tease apart, and annotate existing commits in a way that’s easier and more intuitive than it ought to be. The “INTERACTIVE MODE” section of the git-rebase(1) manual page is instructive but Pierre Habouzit’s demonstration is what flipped the light on for me.

There’s a section of the Git User’s Manual called The Workflow that describes, at a fairly low level, the various interactions between the working copy, the index, and the object database.

Sometimes you may not know if you want to pull in the changes from the remote repository or not. It's useful to be able to examine them before accepting them into our branch. The "git pull" command shown in the previous section is conceptually the combination of two commands, "git fetch" and "git merge". We can use these commands separately to examine the change before accepting it.

The most convenient way to examine the fetched changes is with the "master..origin" range notation

You'll notice that we've been seeing the phrase "fast forward" several times. This is a special-case operation performed by "git merge" where a branch can be advanced along a linear sequence. This happens whenever you pull changes that build directly on top of the same commit you have as your most recent commit. In other words, there was never any divergence or simultaneous commits created in parallel in multiple repositories. If there had been parallel commits, then "git merge" would actually introduce a new merge commit to tie the two commits together.

If you have a situation where you want to pull a single time from some repository, then you can simply give the path or URL of the repository on the "git pull" command line. However, it's often the case that if you want to pull changes from a repository once, you'll want to pull changes from that same repository again in the future. This is where the "git remote" notion is extremely useful---it allows you to associate simple names, (and behaviors), with remote repository URLs We've already seen one instance of "git remote" which is the creation of the "origin" remote which happens automatically during "git clone". Let's now create another. Let's assume you are going to be working in the hello-remote repository and you'd like to pull changes from the hello-pull repository, where your friend "fred" has been making changes. Here's how to setup the new remote:

So that's a "git remote add" command line followed by an arbitrary name you'd like for the new remote (fred) and the URL of the remote (../hello-pull). Obviously, the URL could be a git:// URL or any other git-supported URL in addition to a local path.

The "git remote" command is really just a helper for adding some entries to the .git/config file. You might find it more convenient to edit that file directly once you get comfortable with things.

At this point the name "fred" will work much like the name "origin" has worked in previous examples. For example, we can fetch the changes fred has made with "git fetch fred":

We can also list all known remote-tracking branches with "git branch -r":

These remote-tracking branches make it very easy to collaborate with people as they are working on experimental features not yet ready for upstream inclusion. For example, if fred's latest code is still trashing filesystems then he might not want to push it out to the project's primary repository. But he may still want my help with it. So he can push it to a branch in his own repository for which I've got a remote. Then on my next "git fetch fred" I might notice a new branch called fred/trashes-filesystems and I can examine his code with a command such as "git log ..fred/trashed-filesystems".

Now, generally the purpose of pushing to a repository is to have some "collaboration point" where potentially multiple people might be pushing or pulling. Because there might be multiple people pushing into the repository at any point, it wouldn't make sense to have a working-directory associated with this repository. For this, git has the notion of a "bare" repository, which is simply a repository with no working directory. Let's create a new bare repository and push some changes into it:

git clone hello hello-clone

git remote add fred ../hello-pull

git branch -r

git fetch fred

git --bare init --shared

The --shared option sets up the necessary group file permissions so that other users in my group will be able to push into this repository as well.

Now lets return to our hello repository and push some changes to this new repository. Since this is our very first push into this repository we need to tell git which branches to push. The easiest way to do this is to use --all to indicate all branches:

git push ../hello-bare --all

For subsequent pushes we don't need to specify --all as "git push" by default pushes all branches that exist in both the local and remote repositories.

A lot of this tutorial is dedicated to advocacy, sadly necessary. Those who would rather just cut to the chase will probably want to skip straight to

Yes, it's a bunch of small programs that do one thing and do it well, get over it, they're being unified

we've got a simple and efficient filesystem which competes with RevML but is XML free

Subversion added nothing to CVS' development model.

Another way of looking at it is to say that it's really a content- addressable filesystem, used to track directory trees.

Writing a tool to do something that you want is often quite a simple matter of plugging together a few core commands. It's simple enough that once a few basic concepts are there, you begin to feel comfortable knowing that the repository just can't wedge, changes can be discarded yet not lost unless you request them to be cleaned up, etc.

I used to push strongly for SVK, but got brow-beaten by people who were getting far more out of their version control system than I knew possible until I saw what they were talking about.

SVK could easily use git as a backing filesystem and drop the dependency on Subversion altogether. So could bzr or hg.

The repository model (see right) is also simple enough that there are complete git re-implementations you can draw upon, in a variety of languages.

git is first and foremost a toolkit for writing VCS systems

You might use a continual integration server that is responsible for promoting branches to trunk should they pass the strictures that you set.

I really haven't seen a nicer tool than gitk for browsing a repository.

gitk does some really cool things but is most useful when looking at projects that have cottoned onto feature branches (see feature branches, below). If you're looking at a project where everyone commits largely unrelated changes to one branch it just ends up a straight line, and not very interesting.

You can easily publish your changes for others who are switched on to git to pull. At a stretch, you can just throw the .git directory on an HTTP server somewhere and publish the path.

There's the git-daemon for more efficient serving of repositories (at least, in terms of network use), and gitweb.cgi to provide a visualisation of a git repository.

With Subversion, everyone has to commit their changes back to the central wiki, I mean repository, to share them.

With Git (actually this is completely true for other distributed systems), it's trivial to push and pull changes between each other. If what you're pulling has common history then git will just pull the differences.

If the person publishes their repository as described above, using the git-daemon(1), http or anything else that you can get your kernel to map to its VFS, then you can set it up as a "remote" and pull from it

Most people say "but I don't want branches". But users of darcs report that they didn't know how much they really did want branches, but never knew until darcs made it so easy. In essence every change can behave as a branch, and this isn't painful.

Because you can easily separate your repositories into stable branches, temporary branches, etc, then you can easily set up programs that only let commits through if they meet criteria of your choosing.

There's also a pure Java

Some repositories, for instance the Linux kernel, run a policy of no commit may break the build. What this means is that if you have a problem, you can use bisection to work out which patch introduced the bug.

Because you can readily work on branches without affecting the stable branch, it is perfectly acceptable for a stable branch to be updated by a single maintainer only

There is an awful lot less to keep in your head, and you don't have to do things like plan branching in advance.

Good feature branches mean you end up prototyping well-developed changes; the emphasis shifts away from making atomic commits. If you forgot to add a file, or made some other little mistake, it's easy to go back and change it. If you haven't even pushed your changes anywhere, that's not only fine, but appreciated by everyone involved. Review and revise before you push is the counter-balance to frequent commits.

Not only is the implementation fast locally, it's very network efficient, and the protocol for exchanging revisions is also very good at figuring out what needs to be transferred quickly. This is a huge difference - one repository hosted on Debian's Alioth SVN server took 2 days to synchronise because the protocol is so chatty. Now it fits in 3 megs and would not take that long to synchronise over a 150 baud modem.

Disk might be cheap, but my /home is always full - git has a separate step for compacting repositories, which means that delta compression can be far more effective. If you're a compression buff, think of it as having an arbitrarily sized window, because when delta compressing git is able to match strings anywhere else in the repository - not just the file which is the notional ancestor of the new revision. This space efficiency affects everything - the virtual memory footprint in your buffercache while mining information from the repository, how much data needs to be transferred during "push" and "pull" operations, and so on. Compare that to Subversion, which even when merging between branches is incapable of using the same space for the changes hitting the target branch. The results speak for themselves - I have observed an average of 10 to 1 space savings going from Subversion FSFS to git.

Perhaps somebody has already made a conversion of the project and put it somewhere

git-svn fetch

But people who use git are used to treating their repositories as a revision data warehouse which they use to mine useful information when they are trying to understand a codebase.

importing the whole repository from Subversion

git svn init

git svn fetch

If you like, you can skip early revisions using the -r option to git-fetch.

make a local branch for development

The name "foo" is completely private; it's just a local name you're assigning to the piece of work you're doing. Eventually you will learn to group related commits onto branches, called "topic branches", as described in the introduction.

Say you want to take a project, and work on it somewhere else in a different direction, you can just make a copy using cp or your favourite file manager. Contrast this with Subversion, where you have to fiddle around with branches/ paths, svn cp, svn switch, etc

Each of those copies is fully independent, and can diverge freely. You can easily push and pull changes between them without tearing your hair out.

Each time you have a new idea, make a new branch and work in that.

But anyway, that copying was too slow and heavy. We don't want to copy 70MB each time we want to work on a new idea. We want to create new branches at the drop of a hat. Maybe you don't want to copy the actual repository, just make another checkout. We can use git-clone again

The -l option to git-clone told git to hardlink the objects together, so not only are these two sharing the same repository but they can still be moved around independently. Cool. I now have two checkouts I can work with, build software in, etc.

But all that's a lot of work and most of the time I don't care to create lots of different directories for all my branches. I can just make a new branch and switch to it immediately with git-checkout:

Once you have some edits you want to commit, you can use git-commit to commit them. Nothing (not even file changes) gets committed by default; you'll probably find yourself using git-commit -a to get similar semantics to svn commit.

There is also a GUI for preparing commits in early (but entirely functional) stages of development.

People used to darcs or SVK's interactive commit will like to try git add -i

correcting changes in your local branch

If it's the top commit, you can just add --amend to your regular git-commit command to, well, amend the last commit. If you explored the git-gui interface, you might have noticed the "Amend Last Commit" switch as well.

You can also uncommit. The command for this is git-reset

HEAD~1 is a special syntax that means "one commit before the reference called HEAD". HEAD^ is a slightly shorter shorthand for the same thing. I could have also put a complete revision number, a partial (non-ambiguous) revision number, or something like remotes/trunk. See git-rev-parse(1) for the full list of ways in which you can specify revisions.

I sometimes write commands like `gitk --all `git-fsck | awk '/dangling commit/ {print $3}'`' to see all the commits in the repository, not just the ones with "post-it notes" (aka references) stuck to them.

"Another" way to revise commits is to make a branch from the point a few commits ago, then make a new series of commits that is revised in the way that you want. This is the same scenario as before.

I've introduced a new command there - git-cherry-pick. This takes a commit and tries to copy its changes to the branch you've currently got checked out. This technique is called rebasing commits. There is also a git-rebase command which probably would have been fewer commands than the above. But that's my way.

Using Git opens the door to a bazaar of VCS tools rather than sacrificing your projects at the altar of one.

keep your local branch up to date with Subversion

The recommended way to do this for people familiar with Subversion is to use git-svn rebase.

Note: before you do this, you should have a "clean" working tree - no local uncommitted changes. You can use git-stash (git 1.5.3+) to hide away local uncommitted changes for later.

This command is doing something similar to the above commands that used git-cherry-pick; it's copying the changes from one point on the revision tree to another

Better still is to bunch up your in-progress working copy changes into a set of unfinished commits, using git add -i (or git-gui / git-citool). Then try the rebase. You'll end up this time with more commits on top of the SVN tree than just one, so using Stacked Git you can "stg uncommit -n 4" (if you broke your changes into 4 commits), then use "stg pop" / "stg push" to wind around the stack (as well as "stg refresh" when finished making changes) to finish them - see

Once you grok that, you'll only need to use stg and git-svn fetch.

in my experience stg is the best tool for rebasing

Ok, so you've already gone and made the commits locally that you wanted to publish back to the Subversion server. Perhaps you've even made a collection of changes, revising each change to be clearly understandable, making a single small change well such that the entire series of changes can be easily reviewed by your fellow project contributors. It is now time to publish your changes back to Subversion. The command to use is git svn dcommit. The d stands for delta

git-svn won't let the server merge revisions on the fly; if there were updates since you fetched / rebased, you'll have to do that again.

People are not used to this, thinking somehow that if somebody commits something to file A, then somebody else commits something to file B, the server should make a merged version with both changes, despite neither of the people committing actually having a working tree with both changes. This suffers from the same fundamental problem that darcs' patch calculus does - that just because patches apply 'cleanly' does not imply that they make sense - such a decision can only be automatically made with a dedicated continual integration (smoke) server.

This is normally what I use in preference to rebase.

This will merge all the commits that aren't in your ancestry, but are in the ancestry of the branch trunk (try setting rightmost drop-down in gitk to 'ancestor' and clicking around to get a feel for what this means), and make a new commit which has two parents - your old HEAD, and whatever commit trunk is up to.

there are many shortfallings in git.

Sadly, this model is in use by virtually every Subversion hosted project out there. And that is going to be hard to undo.

It is possible to use git in this way (see the figure to the right) - but it's not trivial, and not default. In fact git itself is developed in this way, using feature branches, aka topic branches.

Left: what darcs thinks when you start committing without marking tag points.

Right: Subversion has a somewhat smaller brain...

bzr comes with some great utilities like the Patch Queue Manager which helps show you your feature branches. With PQM, you just create a branch with a description of what you're trying to do, make it work against the version that you branched off, and then you're done. The branch can be updated to reflect changes in trunk, and eventually merged and closed.

Windows support is good. Consistent implementation. Experience with the distributed development model. Friendly and approachable author and core team.

Actually the models of git and bzr are similar enough that bzr could be fitted atop of the git repository model

Mercurial is missing lightweight branches that makes git so powerful, and there is no content hashing, so it doesn't really do the whole "revision protocol" thing like git.

If you're on Windows it's probably a lot easier to get going.