I have a problem!
We are working on an iPhone-app and are using git. The problem is that if someone changes something in the project(adds a file and so on..) and i try to pull that change, I have to merge it.
But the merge isn't painless, I often end up getting a corrupt project file and have to spend quite some time just to fix that.
Does anybody have a solution for this problem?
(Sorry for my crappy English)
Project files are notorious for conflicting. I would enable rerere (stands for "Reuse Recorded Resolution") so that if you have to redo conflict resolutions, you can at least have your decisions cached from the previous time you did them. An excellent write up on rerere is located here: http://progit.org/2010/03/08/rerere.html
If you have the inclination, the better thing to look at is an advanced topic of writing a custom merge driver. See "Defining a custom merge driver" in http://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes
Hope this helps.
Three important steps:
Cause git to ignore everything in the project file except for the project.pbxproj under the .xcodeproj folder - use .gitignore for this.
before you pull a changed .pbxproj close your project. One of the biggest problems you face is that if you get a new version while Xcode has the project file open it can just save its "current" version over the changed one you want.
merges will sometimes result in spurious data like ">>>>YOURS" or ">>>>THEIRS" merge markers getting included in the project file. If you have to merge do it manually with a tool like filemerge where you can inspect each change and choose whether to include it or not.
If all this fails and you get a corrupted project file anyway
accept the version someone else submitted and redo your own changes, it's almost always easier and the link errors will remind you soon enough.
learn the value of frequent commits.
Related
I made some changes to my project tonight and messed some stuff up. Is there a way I can go back to how the project was when I opened it? I added/deleted some files but I don't see a way to go back. My last time machine backup was from a few days ago also.
It won't help with the immediate problem, but you need to start using source code control.
This is exactly the sort of problem that source control solves. In Xcode 4 Apple make it particularly easy to start using source code control, as whenever you create a project it offers to create a Git repository for you.
Even for the smallest personal projects, source control is well worth the effort.
There is a possibility to roll back changes if you use XCode's snapshots feature. XCode 4 suggests making a project snapshot before refactoring, for example.
If you don't have the habit to commit or stash changes often (or happen not to use source control at all), snapshots are a nice tool to use before making any major changes that may break the project.
In your current situation though, you're out of luck. Sorry.
I am about to start participating in the development of a medium-sized project (~50k lines) that was until now written by a single person, and not versioned; as a result folders are cluttered with different versions of the same file (named file1, file2, file3, etc.).
I proposed to start using a VCS for it (a priori Mercurial, which is the only one I've ever used -- for my personal projects --, but I'm open to suggestions), so I'm taking any good ideas as to how to "start" the repository. E.g., should I make an initial commit with all the existing files, and immediately make a new commit with the unused files removed? Or something else?
(constructive remarks on mercurial vs bazaar vs git vs whatever are also welcome.)
Thanks for your tips.
E.g., should I make an initial commit with all the existing files, and immediately make a new commit with the unused files removed?
If the size of the repository is not a concern, then yes, that is a good starting point. Otherwise you can just commit what's actually used, and go from there.
As for which system, all DVCSes stick to the same core principles. Which one you pick is entirely subjective — the only way to truly know which one you like is to try each one.
I would say use what you are the most comfortable with and meets your needs. As far as where to start, I personally would seed the repo with the current source as is, that way you can verify that everything builds and runs as expected. you can make this initial seed a branch. That way you can always go back to your starting point before refactoring.
My approach to this was:
create a Mercurial repository in the existing project folder ("existing")
commit all project files to "existing"
create an empty repository in what a different location ("new")
As files are tested and QA'd (this was necessary because there was so much dross in "existing") pull them from "everything" to "new".
Once files had been pulled into "new"; delete the corresponding files from "existing". If access is needed to these files while the migration is under way, push them back from "new" to "existing".
This gave me the advantage of putting everything under some sort of control for recovery purposes, control over introducing the project to the DVCS. Eventually the existing project folder became completely tested and approved for the project moving forward. At this point the "everything" directory could be deleted or changed into a working folder; and "new" became the actual project folder.
I think Mercurial is a good choice. Lightweight, fast, very simple to use and well-integrated with Windows (if that's the platform you're dealing with).
I would probably get rid of all the clutter before the first commit. Delete everything you don't care about, run all the necessary tests and only then do the commit.
Yes, I'm dead set against the 0-day cluttering of repos.
Granted, a 50K SLOC project isn't very big, but if you commit files you already know you won't need, they will make your repo slightly bigger.
Also, remember to check that the tree doesn't contain large binary files. If it does, get rid of them if at all possible.
Each time I do a commit in Xcode I notice that the AppName.xcodeproj file/bundle has been modified. The modifications are obviously important although I don't have enough experience with Xcode to understand them.
What strategy should I use for this? Do I simply commit these changes each time? It's no big deal, it's just that it will appear in SVN history. I'm assuming that I don't add an 'ignore' SVN proprty for this file/bundle, right?
That project folder contains the metadata for your project, so it certainly needs to be included in source control. There are a some user-specific files you can leave out, though. My .gitignore includes these two entries
*.mode2v3
*.pbxuser
But it won't hurt to leave them in, since they don't affect anything when other users open the project.
I have followed this article for every project and it helps me extremely well. You have to commit two files: .gitignore and .gitattibutes first in order for GitX to have effect.
You'd better to add build directory in order not to include temporary binaries into the repository.
I am starting to get a reputation at work as the "guy who breaks the builds".
The problem is not that I am writing dodgy code, but when it comes to checking my fixes back into source control, it all goes wrong.
I am regularly doing stupid things like :
forgetting to add new files
accidentally checking in code for a half fixed bug along with another bug fix
forgetting to save the files in VS before checking them in
I need to develop some habits / tools to stop this.
What do you regularly do to ensure the code you check in is correct and is what needs to go in?
Edit
I forgot to mention that things can get pretty chaotic in this place. I quite often have two or three things that Im working on in the same code base at any one time. When I check in I will only really want to check in one of those things.
A few suggestions:
try work on one issue at a time. It's easy to make unrelated changes to the codebase that then end up being committed as one big chunk with a poor log message. Git is excels here since you can so easily move switch branches, and stash and cherry pick changes.
run the status command before a commit to see which files you've touched and if you've created new files that need to be added to version control.
run the diff command to see what you've actually changed. Often times you find that you've left in some debug logging that should be taken out or made some unnecessary change that is just cluttering up the diff. Try to make your diffs as small and clean as possible.
make sure your working copy builds with your changes in it
update before checking in and make sure that your working copy builds with other peoples changes in it
run what ever smoke test suite you might have to make sure that your changes work correctly
make small and frequent commits. It's a lot easier to figure out what has broken the build when the breaking commit is small.
Other things that the team can do is setup a continuous integration server like David M suggested so that the broken build is discovered as soon as possibly and automatically.
I usually always do a Get Latest before, then build. If build is good then I check in my code.
Here is what I have been doing. I have used ClearCase and CVS in the past for source control, and most recently I have been using Subversion and Visual Studio 2008 as my IDE.
Make my code changes and build on the local machine.
Make sure they do, in fact, fix the bug in question.
Run an SVN update on the local machine and repeat steps 1 and 2.
Run through the automated unit tests to verify that they pass.
If an automated smoke test is available, which automatically tests a lot of the system's capabilities, run it. Verify that the results are correct.
Then go to the build machine and run the build script.
If the project's configuration has changed, this could definitely break a build. Perform an SVN update on the build machine, whether the build script does that or not. Open the build machine's copy of the IDE, and do a complete rebuild. This will show you whether the build box has any problems that you have taken care of on your machine but not on the build box.
The suggestions to keep separate branches for each issue are also very good, if you can keep track of all of the issues you are working on.
First, use multiple working copies (a.k.a sandboxes) - one per issue. So, if you've been working on some complex feature for a while, and you need to deal with a quick bug fix on the same project, check out a new clean working copy and do the bug fix there. With independent working copies for each issue there is no confusion about which changes to commit from the working copy to the reposistory.
Second, before committing changes, always perform the following three steps:
Buld the software.
Run a smoke test (does it start and run without crashing).
Inspect the changes you're checking in by diffing your changes against the baseline.
These should be repeated after any merge operations (e.g. after an SVN update).
At my workplace, the safety net for this is peer review. That is, get someone else to build, run, and reproduce your solution on their machine, on their view.
I cannot recommend this enough. It has caught so many omissions, would-be problems, and other accidental pieces of junk to make it a valuable part of the process. Not to mention that the mere knowledge that you have to place your work in front of someone else before having it go on to the main branch means that you raise your own quality standards.
In the past I have used branching in Clear Case to help with this issue. The process I used is below. I've never used SorceDepot so I do not know how this can be adapted to work with it.
Create a branch for the bug fix
Code all changes on the branch
Code Review
Merge to stable branch in a different view (the different view is important)
BEFORE checking in: compile, test, and run
Check in code to stable branch
By creating the branch and then merging the changes to a different view (I use Merge Manager to do the merge) any files that were not included or checked in immediately cause issues. This way everything gets tested as it will be when checked in on the stable branch.
The best thing to avoid your problems, is to use hooks, that are provided in most SCMs (they are for sure in SVN and Mercurial, and I believe they must be in other advanced SCMs). Attach unit tests to the hook and make it run every time someone checks code in - exactly before it is checked in. This way you will achieve two things:
code in SCM repo will always pass the tests,
you won't make most simple mistakes, because they should be easily detectable, if you have decent test suite.
I like having Tortoise plugins for Windows Explorer. The file icons are all badged with committed, modified or not added icons making it very easy to see what status the files are in. I also enable the meta data for Modified so I can sort changed files in the list (Details) view, where they bubble to the top so I can see them.
I bet there is a Tortoise* plugin for your SCM, I saw one for Mercurial and SVN (and CVS, ugh). I really wish Mac OS X's Finder would accept plugins like Tortoise, its so much easier than having to pop open a dedicated app most of the time.
Get someone else to go through "every" change "before" you check in the code.
Disclaimer: I'm stuck on TFS and I hate it.
My source control structure looks like this:
/dev
/releases
/branches
/experimental-upgrade
I branched from dev to experimental-upgrade and didn't touch it. I then did some more work in dev and merged to experimental-upgrade. Somehow TFS complained that I had changes in both source and target and I had to resolve them. I chose to "Copy item from source branch" for all 5 items.
I check out the experimental-upgrade to a local folder and try to open the main solution file in there. TFS prompts me:
"Projects have recently been added to this solution. Would you like to get them from source control?
If I say yes it does some stuff but ultimately comes back failing to load a handful of the projects. If I say no I get the same result.
Comparing my sln in both branches tells me that they are equal.
Can anyone let me know what I'm doing wrong? This should be a straightforward branch/merge operation...
TIA.
UPDATE:
I noticed that if I click "yes" on the above dialog, the projects are downloaded to the $/ root of source control... (i.e. out of the dev & branches folders)
If I open up the solution in the branch and remove the dead projects and try to re-add them (by right-clicking sln, add existing project, choose project located in the branch folder, it gives me the error...
Cannot load the project c:\sandbox\my_solution\proj1\proj1.csproj, the file has been removed or deleted. The project path I was trying to add is this: c:\sandbox\my_solution\branches\experimental-upgrade\proj1\proj1.csproj
What in the world is pointing these projects outside of their local root? The solution file is identical to the one in the dev branch, and those projects load just fine. I also looked at the vspscc and vssscc files but didn't find anything.
Ideas?
#Ben
You can actually do a full delete in TFS, but it is highly not recommended unless you know what you are doing. You have to do it from the command line with the command tf destroy
tf destroy [/keephistory] itemspec1 [;versionspec]
[itemspec2...itemspecN] [/stopat:versionspec] [/preview]
[/startcleanup] [/noprompt]
Versionspec:
Date/Time Dmm/dd/yyyy
or any .Net Framework-supported format
or any of the date formats of the local machine
Changeset number Cnnnnnn
Label Llabelname
Latest version T
Workspace Wworkspacename;workspaceowner
Just before you do this make sure you try it out with the /preview. Also everybody has their own methodology for branching. Mine is to branch releases, and do all development in the development or root folder. Also it sounded like branching worked fine for you, just the solution file was screwed up, which may be because of a binding issue and the vssss file.
#Nick: No changes have been made to this just yet. I may have to delete it and re-branch (however you really can't fully delete in TFS)
And I have to disagree... branching is absolutely a good practice for experimental changes. Shelving is just temporary storage that will get backed up if I don't want to check in yet. But this needs to be developed while we develop real features.
Without knowing more about your solution setup I can't be sure. But, if you have any project references that could explain it. Because you have the "experimental-upgrade" subfolder under "branches" your relative paths have changed.
This means when VS used to look for your referenced projects in ..\..\project\whatever it now has to look in ..\..\..\project\whatever. Note the extra ..\
To fix this you have to re-add your project references. I haven't found a better way. You can either remove them and re-add them, or go to the properties window and change the path to them, then reload them. Either way, you'll have to redo your references to them from any projects.
Also, check your working folders to make sure that it didn't download any of your projects into the wrong folders. This can happen sometimes...
A couple of things. Are the folder structures the same? Can you delete and readd the project references successfully?
If you create a solution and then manually add all of the projects, does that work. (That may not be feasable - we have solutions with over a hundred projects).
One other thing (and it may be silly) - after you did the branch, did you commit it? I'm wondering if you branched and didn't check it in, and then merged, and then when you tried to check-in then, TFS was mighty confused.
#Kevin:
This means when VS used to look for your referenced projects in ....\project\whatever it now has to look in ......\project\whatever. Note the extra ..\
You may be on to something here, however it doesn't explain why some projects load and others do not. I haven't found a correlation between them yet.
I think I'll try to re-add the projects and see if that works.
#Cory:
I think that's what I'm going to try... I have about 20 projects and 8 or so aren't loading. The folder structures are identical from root... ie: there aren't any references outside of DEV.