Month: August 2009

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temporarily ignoring files in git

Quite often, you want to change a file temporarily whilst you work on something, but you know you don’t want to commit it. Right now I want to change my project’s logging from INFO to DEBUG, but I don’t want to commit that.

There’s a command git update-index which has a flag --assume-unchanged. And it just makes those files ignored for a while.

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
#   (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#	modified:   src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
$ git update-index --assume-unchanged src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml
$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

Easy! Now, edit away.

… time passes …

And now to get everything back to normal.

$ git update-index --verbose --really-refresh
src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml: needs update
$ git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
#   (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#	modified:   src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.xml
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

I have to be honest, this is slightly hacky. It would be nice to be able to tell git “ignore this change,” in the way you can say “add this change”. But it works OK for now.

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JavaScript.pm on OSX

Just a quick note… I was looking at RT#48699 when I noticed that MacPorts didn’t have JavaScript.pm in it’s collection. I needed to install it by hand. Unfortunately, the latest version (1.12) doesn’t install cleanly.

So I’ve forked it and fixed it (along with a couple of other minor nits).

Claes said he’ll apply the patch at some point. So hopefully when 1.13 comes out, this won’t be necessary.

Of course, really I should get to grips with MacPorts and submit a Portfile…

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The importance of Central

One of the selling points of maven is it’s dependency mechanism. You say what code you need, and maven makes sure it’s there for you. The magic behind this is called central. It’s a phenomenal collection of software (much akin to Perl’s CPAN).

This is useful enough that other projects have sprung up that also use central, like apache ivy.

Central also has source code jars (most of the time). This means it’s possible to jump from your piece of code seamlessly into 3rd party code that’s available on central. I can’t imagine getting up to speed with other people’s code anywhere near as quickly without this sort of facility available. Sure, the source is available, but is it a single click away from your code? Not likely. m2eclipse and NetBeans 6.7 make this trivial.

So, having your open source project on central is a really good idea. It lets your users get at it easily and automatically. You really want to do this.

However, getting your projects on to central isn’t simple (see Guide to uploading artifacts to the Central Repository). It boils down to two choices:

  • Package up your code using mvn repository:bundle-create and file a Jira issue for it. This can take four weeks or more.
  • Set up and host an rsyncable repository somewhere. This can be automatically pulled into central.

Both of these options are fairly painful. That’s why for the latest release of jslint4java, I was pleased to see that Sonatype are offering an alternative: oss.sonatype.org. This is much simpler because you can just use the usual maven deployment mechanism (or presumably ivy equivalent). A short while later, oss.sonatype.org will sync up with central.

However, the sonatype guys are (rightly) concerned with the quality of artifacts on central. You have to jump extra hoops to go down this road with your open source projects. The main one that tripped me up was requiring all artifacts be GPG signed, which entailed learning GPG and the maven-gpg-plugin. This took me some time. However, subsequent releasing to central is much easier now I’ve been through all the hoops.

  • If you want to get your open source project on central, I’d definitely recommend checking out oss.sonatype.org.
  • If you want to contribute to an open source project, offering to help get it on to central could be very useful. You’ll not just be helping that project, you’ll also be helping all users of central. The bigger it gets the more useful it is.
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I suck

my FAIL

There’s nothing quite like seeing your failings when they’re painted up against such lofty goals.

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jslint.com mirror

Whilst I ensure I have the latest version of JSLint for each release of jslint4java, it’s often difficult to know what’s actually changed between versions. Unfortunately, Douglas Crockford doesn’t maintain a public version control system1 (which is entirely up to him).

Nonetheless, it’s kind of useful to be able to look at a version of JSLint and say “this changed since the last version”. So, I’ve started mirroring www.jslint.com into a git repository. I check for updates every hour.

This means you can now see how JSLint changes over time.

Now, it’s not as useful as it could be. It would be nice to tie these up to the changes that Douglas posts to the mailing list (e.g. announcing the new .data() support). But that’s quite a bit more work.

I hope that this is beneficial to somebody.

1 It’s amazing how normal public version control has become over the years. This used to be a lot less common, which made projects a lot harder to understand.