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Software for Liquid Argon time projection chambers

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Moving a Legacy Redmine Feature Branch to GitHub

None of the feature branches in the original LArSoft Redmine repositories on cdcvs.fnal.gov will be migrated to GitHub. In addition, the history of remaining branches will be truncated to the time of the migration from svn to git in 2014. These changes will make the GitHub repositories much cleaner than their Redmine counterparts. One side effect of this cleanup, however, is that a legacy branch that came from or has been committed directly to a Redmine repository cannot be committed to or merged with the corresponding LArSoft repository on GitHub. A feature branch created before the migration to GitHub, for example, cannot be merged back into the LArSoft repositories on GitHUb.

The following instructions describe a procedure that will alter the history of a local branch to make it consistent with that in the LArSoft repositories on GitHub. Users can use this procedure to recover legacy working branches created prior to the migration.

General Instructions

These instructions describe how to check-out a legacy feature branch in a local repository cloned from Redmine prior to the GitHub migration, and add it to a new fork on GitHub that then be the source of a pull request to the upstream LArSoft repository.

Important: It is necessary to use mrb v3_03_01 or later.

# Check-out the desired legacy feature branch in a local repository "package"
#
setup mrb
source localProducts*/setup
cd $MRB_SOURCE/<package>
git checkout <feature branch>
#
# Remove the remote 'origin', which points to Redmine, and add a remote 'upstream' that points at 
# the appropriate LArSoft GitHub repository
#
git remote rm origin
git remote add upstream https://github.com/LArSoft/<package>.git
#
# Fork the GitHub repository to your personal account. Make it the remote 'origin'
#
hub fork --remote-name=origin
#
# Download and run the "truncate-history.sh" script on that branch inside the local git repository 
# 
curl -O https://scisoft.fnal.gov/scisoft/bundles/tools/truncate-history.sh
chmod +x truncate-history.sh
./truncate-history.sh
#
# Push the branch to origin in your personal GitHub account, and optionally create a pull request
# to merge the branch to 'develop' 
# (Note that ssh access needs to be enabled for the @push@ command)
#
git push origin <feature branch>
hub pull-request --edit --base develop

Running the truncate-history.sh script will take between a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the repository. This table shows the time it took to run the truncate-history.sh script using branch feature/Spack-MVP1a. (The table of example times is copied from Truncating_commit_history_at_svn_to_git_transition.)

repo runtime # rewritten
larana 0m18.331s 1222
larcore 0m11.186s 761
larcorealg 0m22.399s 1544
larcoreobj 0m0.205s 0
lardata 0m23.491s 1608
lardataalg 0m0.173s 0
lardataobj 0m10.398s 520
larevt 0m9.634s 649
lareventdisplay 0m13.403s 930
larexamples 0m7.436s 509
larg4 0m0.164s 0
larpandora 0m13.518s 895
larreco 1m36.789s 6319
larsim 2m47.225s 8666
larsoft 0m17.011s 1209
larsoftobj 0m0.169s 0
larwirecell 0m0.176s 0

Special cases

What if I have more than one feature branch?

Check out each of the branches in the local repo before removing the Redmine origin. Run the truncate_history.sh script on each branch.

What if there is a fork already existing for your github username?

‘hub fork’ is a noop if the fork of the repo already exists in your GitHub account. If you made a fork before the final migration of larsoft repos, then these forks will be orphaned. You will need to rename/remove these orphaned repos through the Github web interface before running ‘hub fork’.

Update from the primary

git pull upstream

Delete the orphaned fork and starting fresh

To delete an existing old fork that is no longer relevant.