Getting Started/Sources/Amarok Git Tutorial

Amarok is now developed in a Git repository instead of SVN. This was done to help get into place all the needed infrastructure to convert all of KDE, including documentation.

Amarok/Development/Git contains the most up-to-date information on Amarok related git topics. KDE Git page also provides more details.

Basic Development

90% of the time this is all that is needed:

git pull --rebase
#hack, compile, build. It works!
git status #to check if you want to commit all the modified files
git commit -a
git log
git push

git pull --rebase downloads the latest changes. The --rebase option takes any unpushed local commits and applies them to the latest code, moving it to the top of the history. It is the equivalent of git pull; git rebase origin/master. See the "1. Rebase" section of Shipping Quality Code for a good explanation of what rebase does.

If you have uncommited changes you can not rebase. Instead you can git stash, do the rebase, and then git stash apply.

git status will tell you what files are modified. If you created a new file, use git add on it to "track" it. If there are some junk files, you can add a regexp to .gitignore in the root.

git commit -a will commit all unmodified files. You can use git add and then simply git commit instead if you wish to commit only certain files.

Use git log to review the local unpushed commits. Possibly also useful is git diff origin/master, which will give you a diff between the current checkout and what is in the central repo.

git push pushes all the local commits to the central repo.

Follow remote feature branch

With git, feature branches are cheap and easy. Here's how to follow a feature branch someone else has already setup.

Remember that you can't push to git:// URL's when picking what URL to use.

git remote add jeff git://git.kde.org/clones/amarok.git/mitchell/pudaction.git
git remote update
git branch -a
git branch jeff-pud jeff/pudaction-removal
git checkout jeff-pud
#and later you want to switch back to the mainline
git checkout master

git remote add adds a new remote named 'jeff' with the given URL. Think of remotes like bookmarks: you could always just explicitly pull from a URL instead.

git remote update downloads all the remotes you have without merging them, including the remote you just defined. This is a handy command if you're tracking multiple remotes.

git branch -a this lists all the branches you have, including the remote branches. Find the new branch you want to look at.

git branch this command creates a local branch called 'jeff-pud' that tracks the remote branch 'pud-action/pudaction-removal'. You figured out the name of the latter in the previous command.

git checkout is how you switch between branches.

Recommended reading  =

• The Git Parable Background information that will help you understand git and distributed revision control systems in general
• Git to SVN crash course 5 minute introduction to git for experienced SVN users
• Shipping Quality Code with Git Guide to cleanup before a push
• Git for Computer Scientists Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph.
• Linus Torvalds on Git Why git? answered by the man that started it.
• Git Ready! Learn git one commit at a time
• Git Community Book An online book covering git from the basics to some advanced features
• Git Magic Covers some concepts and common usage patterns
• Zack Rusin's git cheat sheet
• Git cheat sheet Yet another git cheat sheet
• git by example git command reference and explanation
• Git Quick Reference Yet another reference of the most used git commands

Todo for this doc

• creating feature branches
• history manipulation. rebase -i, commit --append, and what to do when things go wrong. Probably its own page.