Let's Start Here

With BitBucket's decision to add support for Git repositories, I decided it was time to get rid of my self-hosted svn repositories. If you don't know about BitBucket, it is a service that offers unlimited public and private Mercurial and Git hosting for free. Their pricing model scales based on the number of users with read or write access to your private repositories, which makes it infinitely more flexible than GitHub.

Spiel aside, lets get to the meat of this post. So I want to convert my svn repositories to git, and by that I mean that I want to keep all revisions, branches, and tags. Most posts online list a few commands to fire off but fail to mention a few important post import cleanup steps.

Migration Steps

Create a mapping file to map svn users to Git authors. You can start by running the following command from the root of a local copy of the svn repository: svn log -q | awk -F '|' '/^r/ {sub("^ ", "", $2); sub(" $", "", $2); print $2" = "$2" <"$2">"}' | sort -u > authors-transform.txt which you can than reformat from: username = username to: username = Firstname Lastname <[email protected]>

Next we clone the Subversion repositoy using git-svn. git svn clone [url to svn repository] --no-metadata -A authors-transform.txt --stdlayout [path to local git repo] The -A parameter point to the mapping we created in step 1. The --no-metadata flag tells git to leave all the svn details behind (excluding the commit log). The --stdlayout flag tells git to assume the common "trunk/branches/tags" layout. You can can also follow branches and tags in any layout with the -T/-t/-b options.

You can convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore with: git svn show-ignore > .gitignore Feel free to than version control the file with git: git add .gitignore git commit -m 'Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore.'

Next we need to handle branches and tags which git-svn imports as strange remote branches. We can do this in two ways, depending on how the git-svn handled the import. First, you can try to move the remote references to local branches using: cp -Rf .git/refs/remotes/tags/* .git/refs/tags/ rm -Rf .git/refs/remotes/tags cp -Rf .git/refs/remotes/* .git/refs/heads/ rm -Rf .git/refs/remotes If your .git/refs/remotes directory is empty, aside from an also empty tags directory, this will fail because there is nothing to copy. You can fix the issue by checking the file .git/packed-refs and doing a search and replace in the following order: refs/remotes/tags => refs/tags refs/remotes => refs/heads

When importing, git-svn should have created a remote branch called trunk than is synonymous with git's standard master branch. We should merge this branch back into master using: git checkout master git merge trunk git branch -d trunk

We can now add a remote repository alias to our bitbucket repository: git remote add origin [url to bitbucket repo]

And finally we push a mirror of our local repository to bitbucket git push origin --mirror

The end result should be a git repository with all svn revisions, branches, and tags. That was way more complicated than it should have been :) Hopefully in the future these steps are incorporated into git-svn.

References

Convert SVN Repositories to Git Repositories. [epicserve gist]

I rely heavily on Zend Framework when prototyping Drupal modules. It provides me with an easier way to create and manage my view scripts, database calls, and logic. Recently, I needed to create a form with a text field for username entry. I wanted to provide the user with username AutoCompletion instead of assuming that they will fully type or copy & paste their entry. So lets use Zend_View to enable AutoCompletion for our test field as opposed to making use of Drupal’s Form API.

To begin, I took a look at the source behind the “Edit Comment” form – a common Drupal form that I know uses username AutoCompletion. Two sections are of particular interest to us:

jQuery scripts in the head section ... <script type="text/javascript" src="/misc/jquery.js?x"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/misc/drupal.js?x"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/misc/autocomplete.js?x"></script> ...

The author text field ... <div class="form-item" id="edit-author-wrapper"> <label for="edit-author">Authored by: </label> <input type="text" maxlength="60" name="author" id="edit-author" size="30" value="admin" class="form-text form-autocomplete" /> </div> <input class="autocomplete" type="hidden" id="edit-author-autocomplete" value="/user/autocomplete" disabled="disabled" /> ...

If you have ever poked around the core node.module you know that this html will only appear if your Drupal installation contains more than 200 users.

Opening up autocomplete.js, we can infer how everything works. When included, Drupal’s AutoCompletion processes every input field with a class of ‘autocomplete’ and an id of ‘{target}-autocomplete’ and a value of ‘{url}’. It will instantiate an AutoCompletion callback on ‘{url}’ if another field of id ‘{target}’ exists on the page.

So, we can write the following code to create the same effect using Zend_View in a module’s page callback function:

function page_callback() {     $view = Zend_Registry::get('view');     // Force Drupal to include JS scripts     @drupal_add_js('misc/autocomplete.js');     // Return a simple example of what we discussed     return $view->formText('username', null, array('size' => '30', 'maxlength' => '60', 'class' => 'form-autocomplete')) .            $view->formHidden('username-autocomplete', '/user/autocomplete', array('disabled' => 'disabled', 'class' => 'autocomplete')); }

Since the start of 2010, I have been working as a developer for the Collegiate StarLeague. For the uninitiated, the CSL is exactly what it sounds like: a collegiate StarCraft league where students across North America put aside their homework, friends, and Saturday nights for the thrill of real-time strategy; A league where students fight for their team, their university, and most of all, for e-Sports. Today, over one-hundred sixty teams are registered for the fourth season of the CSL and our first season of StarCraft II.

Gearman is a framework that can be used to dispatch work in parallel, load balance, queue, or perform function calls between languages.

Gearman was written by Brad Fitzpatrick of Danga Interactive. The C rewrite of the original perl gearman-server in not available under Debian Stable, so if you’d like to be on the bleeding edge, take the following steps to install the latest version.

Installing Gearmand (C)

Several dependencies are required to build gearmand, and you can run apt to check if you have already installed those packages: apt-get install libevent-dev g++ make uuid-dev

Find the latest germand tarball on Launchpad (At the time of writing this was 0.14)

Download and unpack the source: wget http://launchpad.net/gearmand/trunk/0.11/+download/gearmand-0.xx.tar.gz tar xvzf gearmand-0.xx.tar.gz cd gearmand-0.xx

Continue with a typical install: ./configure make make test make install

Finally, run ldconfig to create the required links and cache to the newly created gearman library files

If you are developing in PHP, it would be beneficial to install the PHP extension that provides an API for communicating with Gearmand.

Installing the Gearman PHP Extension

We need the PHP development package (and the pear package if you intend on installing the extension using PEAR): apt-get install php5-cli php5-dev php-pear You may already have installed these packages when you set up your PHP stack, so remove those you find unnecessary.

Find the latest tarball on PECL (At the time of writing this was 0.7.0)

Download and unpack the source: wget http://pecl.php.net/get/gearman-0.x.x.tgz tar zxvf gearman-0.x.x.tgz cd gearman-0.x.x

You could install the package using PECL, but we’ll perform the build manually: phpize ./configure make make install The phpize command prepares the build environment for a PHP extension

Add the extension to your apache2 config – In my case i create a file called /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/gearman.ini with the following line: extension = gearman.so

I recently dumped WAMP in favor of a LAMP Guest running on Debian 5.0 (Lenny) in VirtualBox. As I continued to develop code, I discovered that __callStatic() was missing. This magic method was added with the release of PHP 5.3 (included with my version of WAMP). However, PHP 5.2 remains the default branch for Lenny! Dotdeb.org to the rescue =)

Directions for upgrading

Add the following sources to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all deb-src http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all

Make sure you have fetched Dotdeb.org‘s GnuPG key: gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key 89DF5277 gpg -a --export 89DF5277 | apt-key add -

Run apt-get update

Run apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade to PHP 5.3 (make sure the upgrade does not break any dependencies)