I think it's safe to say that the Rails community has decided git is the distributed revision control tool of choice. Unfortunately for me I've been using bzr for the last year or so. Lucky for me it's easy migrate from bzr to git using svn as an intermediary.
svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/svn/project
cd /path/to/bzr/project
bzr svn-push /path/to/svn/project/trunk
git-svn clone -T /path/to/svn/project/trunk /path/to/git/project
I ran across the term 'patch bombing' today, which could be defined as; "multiple application logic changes all rolled into a single source code commit", it's the opposite of an 'atomic change'
I found the term relevant to a background thought I've been pickling over lately....
It's not uncommon for me to be in the middle of adding a new feature when I run across a bit of crufty code that needs to be refactored. Which poses the problem; How do I do the refactoring with out mixing the change sets?
In the past I'd just make both changes and write one fat commit message explaining everything but I always thought this approach smelled bad. Then, Jay Fields blogged about 'using patch as subversion's stash' and turned me on to 'the power of git-stash'.
It turns out that Bazaar, which I'm using for my current project, doesn't directly support this operation either but Jay's patch-stashing approach works just as well for bzr as it does for svn.
My current work related project is KanbanOnRails.
It's home page contains pretty much every thing you could want to know about the project but doesn't explain the meta-project at all. So I thought I'd do that here...
It turns out that I've stumbled into using a rather odd assortment of tools and services to manage this project, but it's working well, so I thought I'd share the recipe here.
I'm using Bazaar for revision control, Launchpad for project managment and Google Docs for most of the actual content.
There's really only two SCM tools out there that I would consider using right now; Bazaar and Git. I'm firmly sold on distributed SCM and from what I've seen so far these two have the brightest future.
I've decided to use Bazaar for this project and to try Git out on the next.
Distributed SCMs work best if you have some public web space available to share branches, with, mine's here.
I've generally preferred using Trac for project management in the past, it's a fabulous tool, but this time I wanted a third party host that could provide a permanent home for the project. That really only left me with one choice, Launchpad, which natively uses Bazaar. Currently none of the other project hosting services; SourceForge, RubyForge, Google Code, etc... support any form of distributed SCM.
I would of prefered a good reliable (free) public wiki for content hosting but wasn't immediately aware of one so I decided to use Google Docs. This is the most likely part of the recipe to change if Google's Wiki is ever released or I find a good alternative.
