From mario at emmenlauer.de  Thu Jan 25 13:48:02 2018
From: mario at emmenlauer.de (Mario Emmenlauer)
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 13:48:02 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Why R should never move to git
In-Reply-To: <040ac460-dd22-ad73-0a3b-ed49deb8cbf7@gmail.com>
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 <040ac460-dd22-ad73-0a3b-ed49deb8cbf7@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e528a2e8-2b8c-28fe-14f5-4e49bc40e355@emmenlauer.de>


Hi Duncan!

I think there are many users whose first experiences with git where frustrating,
and trust me, many people here can relate to your pain. I can certainly say that
I can. At first, git makes significant effort to become fluent in seemingly
"simple" tasks. I can literally feel your pain right now.


But this is the main downside of git: that it can be hard to learn. I overcame
this problem by collecting copy-paste-instructions for the most common tasks.
I think Dirk provided a very nice starting point for a typical pull request, and
next time you need to use git, maybe try his instructions. They are *exactly* what
I use at least once a week. However they are not 1:1 for your current situation,
where you already started a fork.

If you want to solve your current "mess", I personally find the easiest thing to
move all local changes away (to /tmp/ or wherever), trash the github fork, and
start over with Dirks instructions. At point (4) you can copy your changed files
back from /tmp/ and use them for new commits, in this new, clean branch.

Everything else should just work.

Cheers,

    Mario




On 25.01.2018 13:09, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 25/01/2018 6:49 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>>
>> On 25 January 2018 at 06:20, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> | On 25/01/2018 2:57 AM, I?aki ?car wrote:
>> | > For what it's worth, this is my workflow:
>> | >
>> | > 1. Get a fork.
>> | > 2. From the master branch, create a new branch called fix-[something].
>> | > 3. Put together the stuff there, commit, push and open a PR.
>> | > 4. Checkout master and repeat from 2 to submit another patch.
>> | >
>> | > Sometimes, I forget the step of creating the new branch and I put my
>> | > fix on top of the master branch, which complicates things a bit. But
>> | > you can always rename your fork's master and pull it again from
>> | > upstream.
>> |
>> | I saw no way to follow your renaming suggestion.? Can you tell me the
>> | steps it would take?? Remember, there's already a PR from the master
>> | branch on my fork.? (This is for future reference; I already followed
>> | Gabor's more complicated instructions and have solved the immediate
>> | problem.)
>>
>> 1)? Via GUI: fork or clone at github so that you have URL to use in 2)
> 
> Github would not allow me to fork, because I already had a fork of the same repository.? I suppose I could have set up a new user and done it.
> 
> I don't know if cloning the original would have made a difference. I don't have permission to commit to the original, and the manipulateWidget maintainers
> wouldn't be able to see my private clone, so I don't see how I could create a PR that they could use.
> 
> Once again, let me repeat:? this should be an easy thing to do.? So far I'm pretty convinced that it's actually impossible to do it on the Github website
> without hacks like creating a new user.? It's not trivial but not that difficult for a git expert using command line git.
> 
> If R Core chose to switch the R sources to use git and used Github to host a copy, problems like mine would come up fairly regularly.? I don't think R Core
> would gain enough from the switch to compensate for the burden of dealing with these problems.
> 
> Maybe Gitlab or some other front end would be better.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
>>
>> 2)? Run
>> ?????? git clone giturl....
>> ???? to fetch local instance
>> ???? 3)? Run
>> ?????? git checkout -b feature/new_thing_a
>> ???? (this is 2. above by Inaki)
>> ???? 4)? Edit, save, compile, test, revise, ... leading to 1 or more commits
>>
>> 5)? Run
>> ?????? git push origin
>> ???? standard configuration should have remote branch follow local branch, I
>> ???? think the "long form" is
>> ?????? git push --set-upstream origin feature/new_thing_a
>>
>> 6)? Run
>> ?????? git checkout -
>> ???? or
>> ?????? git checkout master
>> ???? and you are back in master. Now you can restart at my 3) above for
>> ???? branches b, c, d and create independent pull requests
>>
>> I find it really to have a bash prompt that shows the branch:
>>
>> ???? edd at rob:~$ cd git/rcpp
>> ???? edd at rob:~/git/rcpp(master)$ git checkout -b feature/new_branch_to_show
>> ???? Switched to a new branch 'feature/new_branch_to_show'
>> ???? edd at rob:~/git/rcpp(feature/new_branch_to_show)$ git checkout -
>> ???? Switched to branch 'master'
>> ???? Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
>> ???? edd at rob:~/git/rcpp(master)$ git branch -d feature/new_branch_to_show
>> ???? Deleted branch feature/new_branch_to_show (was 5b25fe62).
>> ???? edd at rob:~/git/rcpp(master)$
>>
>> There are few tutorials out there about how to do it, I once got mine from
>> Karthik when we did a Software Carpentry workshop.? Happy to detail off-list,
>> it adds less than 10 lines to ~/.bashrc.
>>
>> Dirk
>>
>> |
>> | Duncan Murdoch
>> |
>> | > I?aki
>> | >
>> | >
>> | >
>> | > 2018-01-25 0:17 GMT+01:00 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>:
>> | >> Lately I've been doing some work with the manipulateWidget package, which
>> | >> lives on Github at
>> | >> https://github.com/rte-antares-rpackage/manipulateWidget/.? Last week I
>> | >> found a bug, so being a good community member, I put together a patch.
>> | >>
>> | >> Since the package lives on Github, I followed instructions to put together a
>> | >> "pull request":
>> | >>
>> | >> - I forked the main branch to my own Github account as
>> | >> <https://github.com/dmurdoch/manipulateWidget>.
>> | >>
>> | >> - I checked out my fork into RStudio.
>> | >>
>> | >> - I fixed the bug, and submitted the pull request
>> | >> <https://github.com/rte-antares-rpackage/manipulateWidget/pull/47>.
>> | >>
>> | >> Then I felt good about myself, and continued on with my work.? Today I
>> | >> tracked down another bug, unrelated to the previous one.? I know enough
>> | >> about git to know that I shouldn't commit this fix to my fork, because it
>> | >> would then become part of the previous pull request.
>> | >>
>> | >> So I created a branch within my fork, and committed the change there. But
>> | >> Github provides no way to create a pull request that only includes the new
>> | >> stuff!? Every attempt I made would have included everything from both bug
>> | >> fixes.
>> | >>
>> | >> I've read online about creating a new branch based on the master copy, and
>> | >> "cherry picking" just the final change:? but all the instructions I've tried
>> | >> so far have failed.
>> | >>
>> | >> Okay, I know the solution:? I need to burn the whole thing down (to quote
>> | >> Jenny Bryan).? I'll just create a new fork, and put the new bug fix in a
>> | >> branch there.
>> | >>
>> | >> I can't!? I don't know if this is a Git restriction or a Github restriction,
>> | >> but it won't let me create a new fork without deleting the old one.? I don't
>> | >> know if deleting the previous fork would also delete the previous PR, so I'm
>> | >> not going to do this.
>> | >>
>> | >> This is ridiculous!? It is such an easy concept:? I want to take the diff
>> | >> between my most recent commit and the one before, and send that diff to the
>> | >> owners of the master copy.? This should be a trivial (and it is in svn).
>> | >>
>> | >> Git and Github allow the most baroque arrangements, but can't do this simple
>> | >> task.? That's an example of really bad UI design.
>> | >>
>> | >> Duncan Murdoch
>> | >>
>> | >> ______________________________________________
>> | >> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> | >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>> | >
>> | >
>> | >
>> |
>> | ______________________________________________
>> | R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> | https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel



Viele Gruesse,

    Mario Emmenlauer


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[Rd] Why R should never move to git
Mario Emmenlauer