El Tramo | Git

(Still) Hard at Work

2010-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

Several people have been asking us about the status of Swift lately. Rest assured, we’ve been hard at work in the past months, despite all the job changes, house movings, and marriages slowing us down sometimes. And we have proof: below is a Gource visualization of the Swift Git repository from the past months (and we definitely wouldn’t fake that). Swift is getting very near to the beta stage, so stay tuned for more updates!

(Note: For some reason, the video starts out a bit flaky, but it gets better after a few seconds)

Trying out Git

2008-08-26T00:00:00+02:00

A while ago, the Psi development team switched from Darcs to Subversion for version control, because the Darcs pros (distributed, extremely simple and elegant) did not compensate for the cons any longer (slowness, non-scalability, ‘infinite’ merges, lack of community and tools, ...). Our development was pretty central anyway at that time, so we decided that Subversion was good enough. However, we started to miss local commits more than we thought we would, and some of us are working on their own forks, which makes Subversion a suboptimal choice. We are therefore currently trying out Git as a replacement, which should bring us all the good stuff from Darcs, combined with the speed and portability of Subversion. Note that during the experiment, we will not be updating our Subversion branch any more (which will soon cause breakage, since Subversion automatically updates changes to the external Iris repository). If you're interested in following our latest developments from our experimental Git tree, simply clone our official repository through the following steps:

git clone git://git.psi-im.org/psi.git
cd psi
git submodule init
git submodule update

To get the latest changes after an initial clone, execute the following commands

git pull
git submodule update

Note that you need Git 1.5 or later in order to be able to do these commands. If you're interested in knowing more about using Git, check out Scott Chacon's excellent Git talk (and accompanying book). For fans of social networking, we also have a mirror of the official Psi repository on GitHub. And while we're on the topic of web interfaces: while waiting for an official web interface to our Git repository, you can check out an experimental one here.

WiGit: A Simple Git-based Wiki

2008-07-21T00:00:00+02:00

For a while now, I've been looking for a simple wiki to manage my personal notes and to do some basic shared editing. After looking through the vast number of wikis on WikiMatrix and still not finding what I was looking for, I ended up doing what hundreds have done before me: wrote my own wiki, and threw it on the pile of exitsing ones. Up until recently, I've been using TipiWiki as my notebook, which is very light, simple, and easy to deploy. However, recently started running into its limitations, including limited markup possibilities (e.g. no multi-level lists), the lack of decent history (seeing who changed what, when), ... I liked the idea of git-wiki, which used Git as its backend, giving it good history support, and the fact that all documents are in a real repository. However, git-wiki uses Sinatra, which requires way too much valuable resources than I want to spend on a simple wiki. So, I took the idea of using Git as a backend, threw in the Textile PHP class for marking up text, and wrote WiGit: a simple, themable wiki in PHP (which is less cool, but also less heavy than Ruby/Sinatra), built upon Git, with history support, basic user support (from HTTP authentication), and pretty URLs. The default theme is still rough, and there are still a bunch of features coming up, but it should function properly already as a simple wiki for your everyday needs.