Changelog

Ire Aderinokun on her blog bitsofcode: I prefer to interface with git via the command line, at least for the simple commands. However, I’m a bit lazy, and don’t like having to repeatedly type out the same long commands multiple times a day. Over the years, I have created some short aliases that allow me to more quickly use git via the command line. Creating aliases for common commands is definitely the way to go. I do something similar in my dotfiles, except I categorize aliases by the language or technology.

Drew Devault, announcing “sir hat” (or however you want to refer to it) For those who are new, let me explain what makes sr.ht special. It provides many of the trimmings you’re used to from sites like GitHub, Gitlab, BitBucket, and so on, including git repository hosting, bug tracking software, CI, wikis, and so on. However, the sr.ht model is different from these projects - where many forges attempt to replicate GitHub’s success with a thinly veiled clone of the GitHub UI and workflow, sr.ht is fundamentally different in its approach. This has folks pretty excited. But what’s all the hubbub about? Well, in addition to being 100% free and open source… sr.ht is special because it’s extremely modular and flexible, designed with interoperability with the rest of the ecosystem in mind. On top of that, sr.ht is one of the most lightweight websites on the internet, with the average page weighing less than 10 KiB, with no tracking and no JavaScript. The flagship product from the software suite is it’s CI platform, which: is easily the most capable continuous integration system available today. It’s so powerful that I’ve been working with multiple Linux distributions on bringing them onboard because it’s the only platform which can scale to the automation needs of an entire Linux distribution. There’s always a potential for hyperbole when the creator is describing their creation, but I’m convinced this is at the very least worth checking out. It might even make for a great episode of The Changelog…

Imagine being able to have many connections to the same database, each one reading a separate branch or commit at the same time. Or even writing to separate branches. This is a good idea and a testament to the versatility of SQLite. Click through to read how it works and how they’ve managed to 2x the performance of SQLite on Linux and macOS.

Phil Nash shared this helpful flow to keep your forks up to date. Most folks can get by with branch, checkout, add, commit, pull and push, but… …what if you want to fork and contribute to an open source project on GitHub, GitLab or BitBucket? You’re going to need a few more commands so that you can keep your fork up to date, namely remote, fetch and merge. Let’s see how they are used…

lazygit is a simple terminal UI for git commands, written in Go with the gocui library. They had me sold at “lazy” 😉

Right now, the only way to sign your git commits is to use PGP signatures (this is all git is able to integrate with). After a less than desirable experience using GPG, without wrote bpb in Rust to replace GPG. I’ve been taking steps toward trying to sign and verify the data in the repo’s index without shipping a copy of GPG with Rust to every user. This means I need to implement enough of the PGP protocol to create signatures and public keys that git will accept as valid. I’ve done this in a library which I’ve named pbp, this stands for Pretty Bad Protocol. This library implements parsing and generation for a small subset of the PGP protocol…

In the wake of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, the murmurs of replacing GitHub with something decentralized have been getting louder. In this article, Drew Devault points out that email-based git workflows are A Thing and one that works quite well. In particular, this blog post is a direct response to forge-net (formerly known as GitPub). They want to federate and decentralize git using ActivityPub, the same technology leveraged by Mastodon and PeerTube. But get this: git is already federated and decentralized! Drew has skin in the game via his sr.ht platform, and intends to make git send-email support a first-class citizen on it. Lots of interesting ideas at play here. After all these years is email still the web’s killer app?

Imagine all your components organized on the cloud, made discoverable for your team and synced in all your projects. That’s Bit. This could be a game changer if they drill the management side of sharing your UI components. Intrigued? Watch the demo video to see what it’s all about.

I hope this service doesn’t promulgate the GitHub-profile-as-resumé meme, because it’s definitely cool and fun to let it crunch the numbers and visualize what you’ve been up to all these years. For example, it determined that my most productive days are Mondays. I didn’t know that!

After explaining why it all matters, Kushal Pandya covers four common situations that you might face while working with Git: I need to change the most recent commit I need to change a specific commit I need to add, remove, or combine commits My commit history doesn’t make sense, I need a fresh start!

It can be used to perform SQL queries about the Git history and about the Universal AST of the code itself. gitbase is being built to work on top of any number of git repositories. The emphasis here is on querying a bunch of repositories at once, not digging deep in to the history of a single repo. It uses MySQL’s wire protocol to communicate, so it can be accessed by any compatible client or library. gitbase is still in early alpha, but they’re working hard to improve it quickly.

If this looks familar to you (demo here), that’s because it’s a community managed fork of Gogs. Why the fork? We’re a growing group of former Gogs users and contributors who found the single-maintainer management model of Gogs frustrating and thus decided to make an effort to build a more open and faster development model. This happened back in December of 2016, so it’d be interesting to compare and contrast the progress of both projects over time. At first glance, I’d say that Gogs is keeping up quite nicely with its BDFL model. But who knows, maybe the mere existence of Gitea spurred Unknwon on toward more actively maintaining Gogs.

This thing is packed with features, but the one that really impressed me (and may ultimately lead to me giving VS Code another go) is the Code Lens with inline git blames. Adds an unobtrusive, customizable, and themable, blame annotation at the end of the current line So cool! I do fear that it may become more annoying than useful over time, but you never know until you try.

Amjith shares a simple git alias he uses to resume work from where he left off. Perhaps you’ll find it useful, too.

Ever since Heroku delivered git push-based deploys back in the day, the open source community has been hard at work creating alternative solutions with similar UX. Gitkube is the latest tool in this space, combining Docker and Kubernetes to get you started with your own git-based automation.

If you have a shared computer for “work” and “personal” AND you use Git (who doesn’t), then this post will help you easily switch back and forth between the two. At work, most of the repositories are private, but at home most of my work is public, which means that my work email became public, and I didn’t like that. Hence, in this post I will share one way you can go about forgetting to switch back and forth and let the computer do it automatically for you.

We considered going this route with our new infrastructure, but I have to admit that I was ascared of having our secrets in public, even encrypted. My fears were most likely unfounded, and David Karapetyan does a great job of laying out the pros/cons in this article.