Code Review for Git

I wanted to find a way to contribute to projects that I couldn't pair on, and to be able to scan a project for possible changes without sitting down and taking up someone's time. Sounded a lot like automated code review, so I had a look around at available code review tools. There are a few available - Review Board, Smart Bear and Crucible among them. I know Atlassian and generally like their products so I decided to install Crucible and give it a try.

There were a few confusing configuration problems. Until I read the documentation more closely (at all?) I wasn't aware that the beta Git plugin only worked against local git repositories, and I had to change a configuration file to convince Crucible that Ruby files should be treated as text instead of binaries, but once I got past these problems I clearly had a powerful tool for distributed, multi-party code reviews available to me.

So I created a review, looked at some code, and saw one thing that I would change. I wrote the comment, but things just felt wrong. It had taken me a while to type to comment (I'm not the world's fastest typist, but nor am I the slowest), and it felt like a waste of time. It would have been far faster to make the change and annotate the corresponding commit, but what I had was a code review tool, not an editor. Something wasn't working for me.

When I do a code review I want to achieve two things - I want to fix the code and I want to educate someone (where that someone may be me, if I wrote the original code). What I really wanted was something (an editor) that would let me focus on changes between versions, but let me change the latest version and save it. My VCS could store the comments against the (small) changes and I could point people to the VCS history to see what I'd done, potentially using the same tool.

After looking at a few different tools last night I've settled on Changes. Changes lets you compare directory structures and files, and it comes with some Ruby scripts that will help you retrieve specific revisions from Git, drop them into temp directories and review the differences. I've modified the script to use the current directory if you're comparing to HEAD, so that changes to the head are saved directly to disk and can be committed.

Here's my process:

1) Use GitX to determine the revision I want to use as the base
2) Use changes to view the differences
3) Incrementally work through the files either making changes or excluding the files.

I've created a (silent) video that shows me working through one review. I only make one small change, so it's mostly scrolling and excluding. One small point - the video uses an older version of my Ruby script that created a temp directory even if you were looking at HEAD, so changes were lost. I've fixed that in this version.

I saw some comments that Changes was rather expensive (US$49.99), but it's really cheap compared to many code review tools so I'm pretty happy with this approach.

Batch Conversion of Pages file *in Leopard*

I was very proud of my Pages to rtf script, and then I upgraded to Leopard last night and it stopped working! In my search for the answer I came across this post, which solves the problem more thoroughly, though you need to combine it with information from here as well.

In case you don't want to do this yourself, here's a script that will start Pages, prompt you for the type of export you want, and then prompt you for a destination directory, and it works under Leopard. I told you it was more thorough than my last solution :-)

[sourcecode language='jscript']
on open theFiles
tell application "System Events"
if process "Pages" exists then
display dialog "whoops, please close Pages before running droplet!"
end if
end tell
tell application "Pages"
activate
delay 1
close front document
set theList to {"doc", "rtf", "pdf", "txt"}
set theType to (choose from list theList OK button name "Select" with title "Pages Export" with prompt "Choose one or more formats to export using Pages" with multiple selections allowed) as text item
set s to theType as string
set theLocation to choose folder
set theLocation to theLocation as string

repeat with aFile in theFiles
open aFile

if theType contains "doc" then
set asType to "SLDocumentTypeMSWord"
set docName to name of front document

-- Remove .pages extension.
set prevTIDs to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ".pages"

-- Add .doc extension.
set docNameNew to first text item of docName & asType
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to prevTIDs

-- Save file to Desktop.
set docPathAndName to theLocation & docNameNew
save front document as asType in docPathAndName

end if
if theType contains "rtf" then
set asType to "SLDocumentTypeRichText"

set docName to name of front document

-- Remove .pages extension.
set prevTIDs to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ".pages"

-- Add .doc extension.
set docNameNew to first text item of docName & asType
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to prevTIDs

-- Save file to Desktop.
set docPathAndName to theLocation & docNameNew
save front document as asType in docPathAndName
end if
if theType contains "pdf" then
set asType to "SLDocumentTypePDF"
set docName to name of front document

-- Remove .pages extension.
set prevTIDs to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ".pages"

-- Add .doc extension.
set docNameNew to first text item of docName & asType
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to prevTIDs

-- Save file to Desktop.
set docPathAndName to theLocation & docNameNew
set s to save front document as asType in docPathAndName

end if
if theType contains "txt" then
set asType to "SLDocumentTypePlainText"

set docName to name of front document

-- Remove .pages extension.
set prevTIDs to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ".pages"

-- Add .doc extension.
set docNameNew to first text item of docName & asType
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to prevTIDs

-- Save file to User Specified Location
set docPathAndName to theLocation & docNameNew
save front document as asType in docPathAndName
end if
try
close front document saving no
end try
end repeat
quit
end tell
end open
[/sourcecode]

Installing Postgres on Leopard

Excellent article on installing Postgres from binaries on Leopard. Just make sure you have XCode installed first.

Installing Git on my Mac

Inspired by Dr Nic's post I wanted to install git on my Intel-based Mac. Why? There were two motivations - I frequently do work on the train or tram, and less often on planes, which is the reason Nic describes, but I also wanted to be able to commit mini-milestones on my local machine that I'm not really ready to commit to the "point of truth" on svn. This is the point where I reveal that I don't do all of my programming test first, but that's a longer thread. Suffice it to say that there are periods where I need to work to get the test coverage back over the threshold (currently set to 99.2%) and I don't want to commit to svn until the test coverage is back there.

I installed git-core from MacPorts, but when I ran git-svn I didn't have a "clone" command, which is what all the cool kids are talking about. I'm still not sure that I know precisely why that was the case, but in poking around on the web I found a few places with installation instructions, and eventually things were working, so I'll add what I did to the pool (my main motivation is letting you know the problem I was trying to fix though).

1. Followed the instructions from http://www.beyondthetype.com/2007/6/15/guide-to-installing-git-on-a-intel-based-mac to install the latest version of Git from source


2. Re-installed subversion using the package from http://downloads.open.collab.net/binaries.html. Why? Because the last step in the previous instructions (setting the PERL5LIB) didn't help, and I couldn't find the svn-perl libraries anywhere. The instructions on http://speirs.org/2007/07/22/getting-git-svn-working-on-the-mac/ were helpful. After the subversion installation I had a directory /usr/local/lib/svn-perl, which did the job.


3. Added export PERL5LIB='/usr/local/lib/svn-perl' to my .profile


4. Added /usr/local/git-1.5.2.1 to PATH in my ,profile (early on, to make sure git was found here first)


5. When I tried git-svn I got an error concerning Term::ReadKey when perl tried to prompt me for a password. I tried to install Term::ReadKey from CPAN interactively (sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'shell'
   , then 'install Term::ReadKey', but got "Can't exec "./make": No such file or directory at /System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/CPAN.pm line 4566.". The answer was to change directory to ~/.cpan/build/TermReadKey-2.30 and execute the following commands: sudo perl MakeFile.pl; sudo make; sudo make test; sudo make install. Now I have the Term::ReadKey module installed!


6. When I tried to 'gitify' after that, I got this message : "error: More than one value for the key svn-remote.svn.fetch: :refs/remotes/git-svn". This seems to have been caused by previous failed attempts - removing the xxx.git file and running 'gitify' again seemed to work.

For people like me who are less than clear about the result, here's what you get:

1. A copy of your project in '../project_name.git'. This is your git working directory.


2. Your repository is in .git in the git working directory.


3. Change into the git working directory and start doing your stuff


4. You'll probably find these commands useful:
   
   
   
   • git status : tells you what's uncommitted
   
   
   • git add : adds a new file to version control. "git add *" seems to do everything you'd want :-)
   
   
   • git checkout -f : reverts local changes
   
   
   • git commit -a : commits any modifications (but not new files) to the repository
   
   
   • git-svn rebase : merge svn changes into your git repository
   
   
   • git-svn dcommit : commits all your changes back to svn
   
   
   
   

And if I'd known it was going to be this hard when I started, I wouldn't have.

Quicksilver

My Quicksilver education continues. I watched the Merlin Show on using menu items from within Quicksilver (episode 8), and thought it was a great idea (especially for Textmate, which I'm also trying to learn). But when I tried out the example in my QS, it didn't work; at least not at first. So here are the prerequisites for getting menu items to work:

1. Activate "Enable Advanced Features" in Preferences -> Application


2. Activate the "User Interface Access (+)" plugin


3. Make sure that "Enable access for assistive devices" is selected in OS X System Preferences -> Universal Access. I don't have this enabled by default because I use iKey during training courses and it only works if access for assistive devices is turned off.

Hopefully that's it! But if not, Howard Melman has written an excellent Quicksilver User's Guide.