I have a large (hundreds of files), horribly disorganized (on the file system that is) Xcode project. I want to move a bunch of files into different folders. I want git to track the move operations, and I want my Xcode project to track the moves as well (just keeping the references intact is enough; I don't need Xcode to rearrange its internal group structure, etc.)
If I drag things around in the Finder, both Xcode and git are in the dark. I have faith that git will figure things out by content when the time comes, but I also notice that there's a difference in the output of git status between doing a git mv and moving the file in the Finder, then adding the deletion and addition operations separately, so I'm assuming there's some difference (even if that difference doesn't end up getting encoded into the content of the commit.) Xcode, on the other hand, is hopeless in the face of this. (You have to manually re-find every single file.)
If I use git mv from the command line, git tracks the move, but I still have to manually reconnect each reference in Xcode (or tear them all out and reimport everything, which is a pain in the ass because many of these files have custom build flags associated with them.)
It appears that there simply isn't a way to cause a file system move from within Xcode.
I've found zerg-xcode and a plug-in for it that claims to sync the file system to mirror the Xcode group structure, but I've not been able to google up anything that goes the other way. I just want a way to move files on the file system and have the two other things (git and Xcode) to keep track of the files across the moves. Is this too much to ask? So far it seems the answer is, "yes".
Yes, I've seen Moving Files into a Real Folder in Xcode I'm asking whether someone's written a script or something that makes this less painful.
Actually, by design, Git doesn't track moves. Git is only about content. If any Git tool tells you there was a move (like git log --follow, it's something that was guessed from content, not from metadata).
So you won't lose information if you move files around with another tool then git add the whole folder.
Related
I'm programming in xcode (actually Phone Gap in conjunction with xcode) with git. I'm having a strange issue. When I create two identical branches and try to check out back and fourth between them with out making any changes git is telling me that I need to commit because a change has been made (this same thing is also resulting in merge conflicts). It says the changed file is:
platforms/ios/Butterfli.xcodeproj/project.xcworkspace/xcuserdata/benpearce.xcuserdatad/UserInterfaceState.xcuserstate
Can anyone explain what's going on and how to deal with it.
Yes, .xcworkspaces are simply files that Xcode uses to describe the workspace or projects.
IMHO, There's no need to check these files in at all, unless you share settings with other folks in your projects (and in your case, I suppose other machines that have a user named "benpearce").
In fact, you can safely add them to your .gitignore file.
More info can be seen here
I inadvertantly did a very stupid thing last night. I have been working on an iPad project for a couple of months and (even more stupidly) do not have a backup. By right-clicking on the project in XCODE, I mistakenly clicked "Discard Changes"
(stupidity reigns again) I did not have any commits since the initial and when I did the Discard Changes, it seems that it went all the way back to the initial commit, which if I am looking at things correctly looks like each file is as it was the very first time it was saved.
My question is: Is there a way to recover my work? Is it in the .git directory? Is a copy stored elsewhere? or as a last resort, any chance to recover some of the source text with an un-delete utility?
Thanks,
Bob
For little clarification.. one can put back files from the trash as discard changes sends the file in the trash
Answer copied from How to undo xcode discard all changes if not committed
Quit Xcode.
Open the file you wish to bring back your lost changes to using TextEdit.
Go to File -> Revert To -> Browse All Versions...
Scroll through the available versions. Hopefully you will have many available to choose from.
Select a version and hit Restore.
Follow 1-5 for all necessary files.
Launch Xcode. You should now see the M next to these files in Project Navigator indicating they include uncommited changes (the changes you previously discarded).
Completely new files you may have created and were discarded can be found in the Trash.
Also a small piece of advice. If you are in need to discard changes, prefer using Source Control -> Discard Changes by right clicking on files in the Project Navigator, instead of Discard All Changes which might give you all kinds of trouble.
Have a nice day. :)
Well luck was on my side after all. As it turns out, when I did the Source Control > Discard Changes operation, it did not make any changes to the source code save in my project directory. I was able to start a new project and added the files back in. Once I did that I was able to compile and run my project in the simulator just as it was before the incident. I now have a backup as well as committed the changes in git.
You have a hope of fetching this code if you "pushed" & committed your prior-to-discarded changes into your local git repository. Or if you're using MacOS's included Time Machine or some other automated backup solution.
Aside from that, you might be hosed.
If you're on Lion or later, you may have Time Machine backups even if you don't have an external drive. As of Lion, Time Machine will take 'local snapshots' of files; this is how they support the "Versions" feature that lets you go back to previous versions of your files.
If you didn't have Time Machine turned on, though... you may be out of luck.
I ended up having a few Tortoise and/or Subversion malfunctions, and somehow ended up with several versions of the same project:
...\Projects\
MyProject
MyProject(1)
MyProject(2)
MyProject(2) is the one that is the "true" one, and is thus the one I want to keep.
I cut and pasted both MyProject and MyProject(1) to a "holding tank" for eventual deletion, so that I now have:
...\Projects\
MyProject(2)
Now I want to change the name MyProject(2) to MyProject, but I'm afraid to - Tortoise/Subversion is so picky about everything (IOW, it works as intended) that I'm afraid that if I change the name, everything will get all hosed up.
Am I being unduly paranoid? Should I just go ahead and rename it, or does Tortoise/SVN have some "refactor" ability that will make that a safe operation, or...?
You are not being truly paranoid, once you commit, you have that commit forever, it's worthwhile to take the time to make sure your commit is right. Otherwise, you'll still have to spend that same amount of time to do the "fix" commit.
You probably "saved" through the gui some set of items multiple times, and the "window manager" has an option to not overwrite files by adding (1) and the like. If so, odds are good that only one of the branches is actually under revision control. Do a
svn status
in a few directories to determine if these sub-directories have only been copied in place on your system, have been copied and added on your system, or have been copied, added and committed to the repository.
If they have only been copied in place, discover which "copy" is the best, and move the contents of that copy to the "correct" location, and delete the others. Then svn add whatever is necessary and commit.
If they have been copied and added, discover which "copy" is the best, svn revert everything you do not intend to commit, move the contents of the "best" copy to the correct locations, and delete the unneeded files. Then svn add whatever is necessary and commit.
If they have been copied, added, and commited, then svn delete stuff that's "in the way", svn commit, svn move the right stuff into it's correct location, svn commit, svn delete the other unneeded files, and svn commit.
There are many other variations on how to fix this (some much better than I have demonstrated), but hopefully the above examples will get you thinking along the right paths. My examples involve more steps, to keep things simple.
I have been using XCode with subversion for some time now, no problem was caused when I was using it as a single developer (I was using 2 commands only, commit and add).
But now I have to share the code with another developer (who has never used any kind of version control) and integrating/merging the code has become a nightmare. No problem occur when we are integrating/merging .h/.m files but as soon as it comes to ".nib", "xcodeproj" and ".xcdatamodeld" files, we really don't know what to do.
Whenever we try to merge "xcodeproj", project was getting corrupt and merging ".xcdatamodeld" was kind of impossible for us.
So I was wondering if someone can share his/her experience on how to effectively use subversion/git/mercurial with XCode 4.0 in multiuser environment? or share a link, which can explain how to use subversion effectively in multiuser environment.
Thanks.
Are you doing this using Subversion? For 90% to 99% of the files in your repository, the standard Subversion workflow of checkout, edit, commit works well. However, for some types of files such as JPEGS and GIFS simply don't merge well. In this case, you'll have to do it the way we use to in the old SCCS and RCS days: Before you can edit and commit a file, you must lock it.
Locking a file prevents others from editing the same file and committing changes while you're doing your work on the file. It's crude, but it works. In Subversion, you can always lock any file you're editing, but if the file has the property svn:needs-lock on it, it will be checked out as read-only. You have to lock the file before editing it to make it writable, and you're not allowed to commit the file unless it is locked.
So, for those files, set the svn:needs-lock property on it.
You can automatically set this property on all newly added files (depending upon suffix) via setting the auto-properties in your Subversion client configuration.
And, if you really, really want to make sure that all .nibs and xcodeproj and all of the other flies of these types have svn:needs-lock set on them, you can use my pre-commit hook which will prevent these files from being committed unless this property is set.
There is no failsafe way to merge these kinds of files that I am aware of. So you will have to
try to ensure that only one person is changing these files at a time. That won't work always, so just log what you changed in the file with the commit message. Then if there is a conflict, you can manually resolve it by taking the version that changed more of the file and redo manually what the other person did.
That's normally not a big deal, like adding a new source file to an .xcodeproject, or changing the alignment of an element in a .nib. It's becoming a problem if your project is huge or your nib is containing the whole interface. For it to work well (which in practice it does), you need to split up your projects into sub-projects if they grow too huge.
I had the same problem with 2 other developers Xcode with git. Unfortunately, Xcode project files are an XML file, tracks file included in the project as well as setting. I'm not certain, but I think .nib files are also XML files as well. Someone can correct me on that.
Git did a great job at merging the Xcode project file, and never really had any problems with our *.nib files either. The only time we did have a problem is when we both added/removed files with the same names, or someone did a lot of heavy removing and adding of a lot of files.
The only way we solved this was to have each other push ann pull as soon as we added/removed files. So that way the person had the latest files, and didn't add them in their own repository then pull the latest commit which had the same file in it. Or they work adding changes to a file that was removed or renamed.
That is the best solution we found, as soon as we added or removed a file have everyone else in the team pull. Not a great solution btw. However, you should be committing often anyways.
Like many programmers, I'm prone to periodic fits of "inspiration" wherein I will suddenly See The Light and perform major surgery on my code. Typically, this works out well, but there are times when I discover later that — due to lack of sleep/caffeine or simply an imperfect understanding of the problem — I've done something very foolish.
When this happens, the next step is do reverse the damage. Most easily, this means the undo stack in my editor… unless I closed the file at some point. Version control is next, but if I made changes between my most recent commit (I habitually don't commit code which breaks the build) and the moment of inspiration, they are lost. It wasn't in the repository, so the code never existed.
I'd like set up my work environment in such a way that I needn't worry about this, but I've never come up with a completely satisfactory solution. Ideally:
A new, recoverable version would be created every time I save a file.
Those "auto-saved" versions won't clutter the main repository. (The vast majority of them would be completely useless; I hit Ctrl-S several times a minute.)
The "auto-saved" versions must reside locally so that I can browse through them very quickly. A repository with a 3-second turnaround simply won't do when trying to scan quickly through hundreds of revisions.
Options I've considered:
Just commit to the main repository before making a big change, even if the code may be broken. Cons: when "inspired", I generally don't have the presence of mind for this; breaks the build.
A locally-hosted Subversion repository with auto-versioning enabled, mounted as a "Web Folder". Cons: doesn't play well with working copies of other repositories; mounting proper WebDAV folders in Windows is painful at best.
As with the previous method, but using a branch in the main repository instead and merging to trunk whenever I would normally manually commit. Cons: not all hosted repositories can have auto-versioning enabled; doesn't meet points 2 and 3 above; can't safely reverse-merge from trunk to branch.
Switch to a DVCS and "combine" all my little commits when pushing. Cons: I don't know the first thing about DVCSes; sometimes Subversion is the only tool available; I don't know how to meet point 1 above.
Store working copy on a versioned file system. Cons: do these exist for Windows? If so, Google has failed to show me the way.
Does anyone know of a tool or combination of tools that will let me get what I want? Or have I set myself up with contradictory requirements? (Which I rather strongly suspect.)
Update: After more closely examining the tools I already use (sigh), it turns out that my text editor has a very nice multi-backup feature which meets my needs almost perfectly. It not only has an option for storing all backups in a "hidden" folder (which can then be added to global ignores for VCSes), but allows browsing and even diffing against backups right in the editor.
Problem solved. Thanks for the advice, folks!
Distributed Version Control. (mercurial, git, etc...)
The gist of the story is that there are no checkouts, only clones of a repository.
Your commits are visible only to you until you push it back into the main branch.
Want to do radical experimental change? Clone the repository, do tons of commits on your computer. If it works out, push it back; if not, then just rollback or trash the repo.
Most editors store the last version of your file before the save to a backup file. You could customize that process to append a revision number instead of the normal tilde. You'd then have a copy of the file every time you saved. If that would eat up too much disk space, you could opt for creating diffs for each change and customizing your editor to sequentially apply patches until you get to the revision you want.
if you use Windows Vista, 7 or Windows Server 2003 or newer you could use Shadow Copy. Basically the properties window for your files will have a new tab 'previous version' that keeps track of the previous version of the file.
the service should automatically generate the snapshot, but just to be safe you can run the following command right after your moment of "inspiration"
'vssadmin create shadow /for=c:\My Project\'
it has defiantly saved my ass quite a few times.
Shadow Copy
I think it is time to switch editors. Emacs has a variable version-control, which determines whether Emacs will automatically create multiple backups for a file when saving it, naming them foo.~1~, foo.~2~ etc. Additional variables determine how many backup copies to keep.