Git and Subversion :- New Subversion Branch Created

If you have read any of my previous blog posts before, you know that I am use Git in order to track Subversion repositories. Recently, I had another experience that I had to resolve and I wanted to make sure that I share it with you.

The team decided to cut a branch of the code that I have been tracking. After they did that, I ran git svn fetch. After doing this, Git realized that a new branch was created and it started to search through the subversion repository to pull back any history that it might not have.

This probably is a good idea, if I were tracking the entire Subversion history, but I am not. The result was Git was starting to pull back history that I didn't have in my Git repo, nor history that I wanted. It would have taken hours to pull in that amount of history, and as I mentioned, I was not interested in retaining the whole entire repository.

In order to resolve this, I performed the following command:

git svn fetch -r:HEAD --no-follow-parent

I think that the most important part of this command is the --no-follow-parent. This tells git not to look back in time at the history, and just pull in the information from the specified starting point.

I hope that this helps someone else out there....

Pay it forward.

Firefox 3 Download Day

The Mozilla Foundation has declared tomorrow, June 17th 2008, as Download Day. In an attempt to set a Guiness World Record for software downloads, they are encouraging everyone to participate by downloading Firefox 3 tomorrow.

I have been a fan of the Firefox Browser for a number of years now, however I will admit, that only recently have I started using their latest release candidate. This is because there are some add ons in Firefox, that I just cannot live without. Thankfully, the following add ons are now available and supported for the Firefox 3 platform:

Delicious BookMarks
If you are not familiar with the social networking site del.icio.us, it is a site that you can set and share bookmarks. By creating bookmarks and tagging them, those bookmarks become searchable by the social community. This is a great, but I really use it to keep my bookmarks in sync with the many computers that I work on. With this add on, you can log into your del.icio.us account, and use your bookmarks in Firefox.

FireGestures
In my view, Mouse Gestures is another one of those productivity boosters that is great to have in your arsenal. Instead of relying on clicking different buttons in the toolbar or using the Menu system in Firefox, you can simply use the mouse, and wave it across the screen while holding down the right click button, and Firefox will do your bidding. This is one of those features that I often take for granted on my machine, and expect to be available on others. I am disappointed often when I try to perform a Mouse Gesture, only to be greeted with the Context Menu that comes up when you right click on a web page.

Good luck Mozilla Foundation in breaking that Guiness World Record. You can count on my support.