It occurred to me that by setting up a local hg, I had in fact branched, but without the overhead and ceremony associated with branches. Driving the cost of branches to zero is transformational.
Indeed.
I’ve been experimenting with Bazaar for a little while and had a strange idea: why not use branches as a project template mechanism?
$ bzr branch http://tomayko.com/src/ruby-project devel/hello-bill
$ cd devel/hello-bill
$ cat <<. > lib/hello.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
puts 'Hello, Bill'"
.
$ chmod +x bin/hello
$ bzr add && bzr commit -m "say hi to bill"
added bin/hello-bill
added lib/hello.rb
Committed revision 23.
$ cat <<EOF > Rakefile
load 'misc/asciidoc.rake'
load 'misc/project.rake'
Project.new 'Hello, Bill' do |p|
p.package_name = 'hello-bill'
p.version = '3.14159'
p.summary = 'Just saying hi'
p.author = 'Ryan Tomayko <rtomayko@gmail.com>'
p.description = <<-end
A program that writes "Hello, Bill" to STDOUT and exits.
Just because.
end
p.project_url = "http://tomayko.com/src/#{p.package_name}"
p.remote_dist_location = "tomayko.com:/dist/#{p.package_name}"
p.remote_doc_location = "tomayko.com:/src/#{p.package_name}"
p.remote_branch_location = "tomayko.com:/src/#{p.package_name}"
end
EOF
$ cat <<EOF > doc/index.txt
= Hello, Bill {package-version}
The +hello-bill+ program writes "Hello, Bill" to STDOUT and exits.
EOF
$ bzr ci -m "update project info and docs"
$ rake doc package publish
asciidoc -d article -o ./index.html ./index.txt
asciidoc -d article -o ./license.html ./license.txt
source-highlight -s ruby --line-number-ref='' ...
Processing 'lib/hello.rb' ... created doc/src/lib/hello.rb.html
Generating RDoc API Documentation.
tar zcvf hello-bill-3.14159.tar.gz hello-bill-3.14159 ...
zip -r hello-bill-3.14159.zip hello-bill-3.14159
rsync -aP ... rtomayko@tomayko.com:/dist/hello-bill
rsync -azP --delete --hard-links .bzr rtomayko@tomayko.com:/src/hello-bill
rsync -azP doc/ rtomayko@tomayko.com:/src/hello-bill
$ sudo gem install hello-bill --source=http://tomayko.com
$ hello-bill
Hello, Bill
Project documentation and bzr branch now here.
Cool, eh?
I’ve thought through the downside a bit and most of what I come up with is made irrelevant by cheap, distributed branches. For instance, if you want a different doc / test / package / distribution tool, fine: create a branch and make it do whatever you want; then, branch from there instead for your new projects.
I’ve only merged upstream changes from the template project into a downstream project once or twice but I’m expecting to run into silly and potentially annoying conflicts. So far it’s been smooth sailing but we’ll see.
Comments
Hi,
I’ve been reading several of your posts now regarding ruby and I’ve been reading some other guides about ruby, but currently all my sites are written in php.
How is Ruby better than php or even asp? It seems like many people are switching to ruby and I can’t really figure out why.
I’d appreciate your opinion, I’ve bookmarked this post so I can keep my self updates since you don’t have the notify on repsponse feature.
Thank you for your time, Dave
— Dave on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 10:02 PM #