Re: Advice regarding inherited git repository

On Tue, Jan 05, 2016 at 05:42:15PM +0000, Danielle wrote:

I inherited a web site and a git repository. the git repository is cloned 
to the website and a sandbox website (two clones). No commits have been 
done in more than 6 months. The main site has been updated a lot of times, 
the sandbox has lots of test and exploratory code. To bring things up to 
date, I thought of staging and committing all the files in the main site 
and pushing to the remote repository, and then fetching into the sandbox 
clone and merging what is needed (which will be sooo not trivial). Does 
this make sense? Or would it be better to create a sandbox branch somehow? 
I'm used to working with SVN, no real git experience, so I would 
appreciate any advice on how to manage this.

You probably should create a sandbox branch, for your own sanity.
Because git is distributed, each separate repository is implicitly a
branch. So if you did something like:

  1. Commit all the changes on the main site to "master". Push the
     result to some common remote.

  2. Commit all the changes in the sandbox to its "master". Do _not_
     push to the remote.

  3. Pull the changes from the remote into the sandbox. If they're worth
     adding to the main site, push them up. If not, leave them there.

That works; "master" in the sandbox has the experimental changes, but
you don't have to push them anywhere.  However, you are one accidental
"git push" away from sending all of those experimental features to your
remote "master". So it's easy enough to make step 1.5 "git checkout -b
sandbox-cruft" in the sandbox repository, so git knows not to ever push
it to "master".

In general, I'd also say you may benefit from splitting the changes in
each repository into as many separate logical commits as you can (and
possibly even to separate topic branches that you can merge
independently). Given that you inherited this, that's _probably_ too
much work. But if you do want to try it, I recommend "git add -p" for
picking out individual hunks.

-Peff

You probably should create a sandbox branch, for your own sanity.
Because git is distributed, each separate repository is implicitly a
branch. So if you did something like:

  1. Commit all the changes on the main site to "master". Push the
     result to some common remote.

  2. Commit all the changes in the sandbox to its "master". Do _not_
     push to the remote.

  3. Pull the changes from the remote into the sandbox. If they're 

worth

     adding to the main site, push them up. If not, leave them there.

That works; "master" in the sandbox has the experimental changes, but
you don't have to push them anywhere.  However, you are one accidental
"git push" away from sending all of those experimental features to 

your

remote "master". So it's easy enough to make step 1.5 "git checkout -b
sandbox-cruft" in the sandbox repository, so git knows not to ever 

push

it to "master".

In general, I'd also say you may benefit from splitting the changes in
each repository into as many separate logical commits as you can (and
possibly even to separate topic branches that you can merge
independently). Given that you inherited this, that's _probably_ too
much work. But if you do want to try it, I recommend "git add -p" for
picking out individual hunks.

-Peff

Thanks for answering!

I've done the above, but it caused some problems, some of which I 
haven't solved yet. What I have now is a master branch with the site in 
both repositories; and in the sandbox an additional devel branch with 
the changes done. I want to split the devel branch into the actual 
features being explored, and then merge each into master and push when 
done. The main trouble with that seems to be the settings.php file, 
which should be backed up but certainly shouldn't go from one site to 
another. Removing it from the repository caused some problems, even when 
keeping a local cache for some reason (it got lost when switching 
branches and gave me a bad moment until I figured it out). Any 
suggestions?

Add -p will certainly help in the feature branches, thanks for 
suggesting it!