[GTALUG] git questions

[Giles Orr]

Hi Alex.

I live and die by the command line, and I'm fairly sure all of this
can be achieved without installing extra tools (and gitk wouldn't play
well with remote servers).  I'm hoping to have a quick status update
that's always there, no extra commands needed.

On 6 March 2015 at 10:40, Alex Volkov <avolkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Try installing 'gitk' graphical tool that visualize a lot of things your
> asking about. Just run "gitk &" from anywhere under your git project root
> repository.
>
> Alex.
>
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 10:29 AM, Giles Orr <gilesorr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've started using git fairly heavily (although not necessarily very
>> well).  I have several repos: a couple are code, also my ~/.vim/
>> folder and I'm thinking about adding ~/bin/ .  If I remember to push
>> from a particular machine before leaving it, I'll never have to deal
>> with merging as I'm the only user.  While most likely my discomfort
>> with merging will be overcome by practice as I understand git does it
>> well (I use SVN at work: merging is shudder-inducing), I'm guessing
>> keeping everything up to date is still preferable.  These questions
>> are mostly about incorporating information about the repo into the
>> Bash prompt: I was impressed recently by the way zsh appears to handle
>> it, with a sequence of tiny icons in the lower right corner of the
>> terminal indicating relative status.  I didn't talk to the zsh user
>> long, so I don't know if that's built-in, a plugin, or something he
>> did himself.
>>
>> I'm starting from some code I got from nitrous.io, lovely in its
>> conciseness:
>>
>> parse_git_branch () {
>>   git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e "s/*
>> \(.*\)/\1$(parse_git_dirty)/"
>> }
>> parse_git_dirty () {
>>   git diff --no-ext-diff --quiet --exit-code &>/dev/null || echo "!"
>> }
>>
>> Put \$(parse_git_branch) into your prompt and it tells you what branch
>> you're on, and if there are any unstaged changes (and goes away if
>> you're not in a repo).  I'd prefer it did uncommitted rather than
>> unstaged, haven't tried to fix that yet.  But I want to update it as
>> it doesn't deal with origin at all.
>>
>> So, the questions:
>>
>> What is the easiest and most concise way to determine if your local is
>> behind origin master?  I've found that "git remote show origin" will
>> show this information, but I'm not sure if it's the "best" way to find
>> out, and I'm also concerned that running that every time your prompt
>> comes up would slow things down as it makes a remote call(?) to get an
>> answer - when you might not even have a network connection, or worse,
>> a very slow connection.
>>
>> "git status" usually says "Your branch is up-to-date with
>> 'origin/master'" (or "ahead"), but occasionally - even though origin
>> is configured properly - this line doesn't appear.  Is there a way to
>> convince it to always show this line?
>>
>> Unfortunately, "git status" doesn't seem to ever notice if you're
>> "behind" origin, thus the need for "git remote show origin".  Any fix
>> for that?
>>
>> The thought was to have output for the prompt that looked like this:
>>
>> (everything synced): "master-"
>> (uncommitted local changes): "master!-"
>> (behind origin): "master^"
>> (ahead of origin): "masterv"
>> (ahead and behind, with local changes): "master!^v"
>>
>> You get the general idea.
>>
>> I'm aware git is capable of immense complexity (branches, detached
>> head, multiple remotes, different remotes for push and pull, etc.)
>> that aren't addressed here.  If I tried to tackle all of that at once
>> (especially given I don't understand most of it) my head would explode
>> and nothing would get done.  So I'm sticking with my simple use case
>> until I have to deal with the more complex stuff.
>>
>> Any thoughts welcome.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com