Note: This site is currently "Under construction". I'm migrating to a new version of my site building software. Lots of things are in a state of disrepair as a result (for example, footnote links aren't working). It's all part of the process of building in public. Most things should still be readable though.

Switching to Git and Im now officially an Open Source Developer

In the software development world, where I spend a decent amount of my time, there exists a very helpful type of tool designed for what's called Revision or Version Control. Among other things, this type of software provides ways for multiple people to work safely on the same set of files without overwriting each other's work and they provide a way to "roll back" to previous versions of files if you find a bug.

When you are dealing with tens or hundreds of thousand (or more) of lines of code, it's very reassuring to know that if you break something you can easily jump back to one of the earlier revisions where everything was working while you hunt down whatever went wrong.

For the past few years, the Version Control System I've been using is one called Subversion. While it's much better than it's predecessor CVS, Subversion is still a bit clunky and some of the day-in/day-out tasks require enough thinking that it easy to loose the flow of what you are working on when you have to deal with it.

The safety of having the system behind you makes it worthwhile but it's enough of a headache that I started looking for an alternative and after some testing have decided to switch to a different system called Git.

As part of the process, I need to remove literally hundreds of directories from my projects that were created by Subversion as part of the way it manages files. While possible to go though everything and delete them individually, it's much easier and safer to write a little program to do it automatically.

In fact, I've written this same basic thing at least three or four times before when I needed to do some clean up of older Subversion repositories.

In the Perl programming language it only takes 5-10 minutes to create and test a basic one-off script to do this. Instead of doing that again, I'm using this as an opportunity to create my first Open Source project.

There are two reasons for this:

  1. Other people who are going though the same thing might not want to have to build the script themselves. So, this might be of some use to someone else out there if they happen to find it.

  2. I can use it as a chance to try a site/service called GitHub.

GitHub is one of those really excellent parts of the internet. Their primary service is to host Git repositories (which are what Version Control Systems use to do their magic. If you have something that you want to develop just for yourself they have various price points for private storage depending on what you need.

What makes them really shine, though, is that if you are developing a piece of Free Open Source Software, they let you use their system at no cost.

Not only does GitHub encourage developers to produce code and software the rest of the world can use for free, but it also let's people like me who are in the very early parts of the learning curve have a safe environment to get their feet wet with Git.

Once I've gained enough confidence with their system to be sure I won't completely break things, I'll have the confidence to move my mission critical work into my own Git system.

If you are interested to see what the site looks like, the GitHub home page for the script is here.

If you would like to see what the Perl code itself looks like, you can see that here.