home-made Git convenience functions

[jgonggrijp]

Git has a friendly feature that enables you to add a new subcommand bla (just like checkout is the subcommand in git checkout) simply by putting git-bla somewhere in your PATH (for example $RED_SPIDER_ROOT/bin). We could exploit that feature to streamline some of the common branch manipulations in our project. In particular I was thinking about the following commands:

git puma ( PUll MAster) should be equivalent to

git pull upstream master

without first switching to a particular branch; one can have valid reasons to merge upstream/master into any branch and it should be harmless in nearly all cases.

git creto <name> ( CREate TOpic) should be equivalent to

git checkout master
git puma
git checkout -b <name>

In other words, a quick command for everyone who starts working on something new.

git fito <name> ( FInish TOpic) is specific for the situation after a pull request, when your topic branch has been merged into the integration branch but not yet into your local master branch. It should be equivalent to the following "chord":

git checkout master
git puma
(git branch -d <name> && git push origin master :<name>) || echo "Error: not merged."

Note that, if for historical reasons <name> happens to be master, that branch should of course be retained both on the local repo and on the public fork.

More sophistication is possible, for example git-fito could default to the current branch if no <name> is provided. In addition the commands could temporarily cd to $RED_SPIDER_ROOT to ensure that the underlying git commands are able to find the repository.

The suggested commands aren't meant to be exhaustive, one could probably think up more of them.

[lramati]

I know Lleu started working on this, but I'm not so sure its relevant to the project...
Maybe it should be an optional second branch called opt-dev-tools that can be merged into your local copy, with its entire folder (maybe $RED_SPIDER_ROOT/dev/) in the .gitignore file of all the other branches. I would even venture to include everything NOT in $RED_SPIDER_ROOT/dev/ to the opt-dev-tools .gitignore so you can work on both branches simultaneously for ease, but that might be incredibly ugly/messy so I'm not sure its a good idea

[jgonggrijp]

Well of course it's relevant, but only for the hackers. I think it's fine if we just add it into the master branch but don't list it in the user-oriented documentation (as you suggested for the command that walks over all steps necessary for integration). Stuff with parallel branches is bound to get messy.

[lramati]

The reason I said it wasn't relevant is that its more of a git hack, trying
to make it easier to work with, than a useful part of the actual project to
anyone other than a dev

[lramati]

I think a more interesting alternative would be to take a look at the hooks git provides in the project/.git/hooks/ directory

[JonETMeans]

So I've been playing with the 'creto' subcommand you suggested. It is not obvious to me that creating a custom command that accepts input. What I have so far is a command that creates and checks out a new branch called "new_branch." Then the user has to rename the branch to the name he wants with "git branch -m " I don't think this is enough of a simplification to justify its existence. Thoughts?

[jgonggrijp]

I think you're right, that certainly doesn't seem like enough of a simplification. However I'm very sure that you could create a subcommand that accepts additional arguments. Perhaps you could push the experimental code that you've written so far, so we can have a look?