Dr Nic

Git for Rubyforge accounts

First there was CVS, then came SVN to RubyForge. Actually, I’m guessing that CVS was the sole SCM initially, and SVN was added later. I just can’t imagine them starting RubyForge from scratch and explicitly saying “yeah we’ll offer CVS because …”. I don’t know how that sentence would have finished. It must have been added first. There is no valid “because …”.

But now, with each RubyForge project there is a Git repository. This is great for two very good reasons:

1. the end is nigh for empty or unmaintained SVN repositories
2. less centralised decentralised development

GitHub + Gitorious are the go-to-guys for somewhere to hang your proverbial hat: somewhere you push your local git repository to so other people can access it.

Yet when I’m investigate someone’s new RubyGem or other project, the first place I look for its source is RubyForge. I assume the project name is the same as the gem name, and goto rubyforge.org/projects/pastiepacker for example.

Then I click on the SCM tab. Normally this gives SVN instructions. In this modern era, many projects SVN repos can now be blank or unmaintained with Git repos being preferred by many.

So, the reason to push your git repository to RubyForge’s new git system is to make life easier for me. I mean, I don’t know who else clicks on the SCM link, but I do.

While this is all well and great for new projects – you can select “git” instead of “svn” as per the first image above – but I’m not yet sure how to migrate old projects [follow support ticket].

The other reason is to actually help your distributed repository be distributed. Push it to github. Push it to gitorious. And now you can push it to rubyforge. Sweet.

Adding another remote repository

Since your default remote repository is probably called “origin”, you may wonder how such a naming schema could ever expand to multiple remote repositories? Might I suggest “rubyforge” as the name of the rubyforge repository?

git remote add rubyforge gitosis@rubyforge.org:pastiepacker.git
git push rubyforge master
git push origin master

If you do this for all your projects, perhaps a bash script is in order:

function gpall() {
  git push rubyforge master
  git push origin master
}

One project equals one repository, but multiple packages

Using a Rubyforge project’s git repository might be problematic where you release multiple packages/rubygems (codeforpeople, seattlerb, mongrel, drnicutilities, etc). Here I’d prefer one repository per package, rather than one repository for the whole “project”.

Perhaps you could push the master branch from your local repository for each package into different branches of the rubyforge git repository. Thoughts?

Can’t push to your rubyforge git repo?

From the FAQ:

RubyForge Git repositories are managed via gitosis; gitosis does authentication via public keys. This means that in order to push to a RubyForge Git repository you’ll need to upload a public key to your account – see notes on that here.

Generally, Git support is something we’ve just introduced, so feedback about it on the forums would be quite welcome.

What is Pastie Packer?

I can’t tell you. Its a secret.

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