Simon Gregory

Initially I set out with the aim to switch from Subversion to Git before there was an official plan from the TextMate crew. This has now changed, and all bundles that show Github activity are being removed from the TextMate svn repository. Which means that the official bundles I mirrored now have a duplicate Github mirror, and one that is more central for TextMate users and should be the root of all development. The Apache bundle was easy to sort, as there were no forks I could simply delete my copy. The Ant bundle wasn’t so straightforward.

Theoretically there’s no reason why two mirrored repositories couldn’t be used as each can be added as a remote. But because of their independent initialisation against the svn repo their histories aren’t identical this doesn’t work correctly in practice. Even though the file contents are identical at each commit git still recognises separate commits because git-svn appends unique metadata. So you end up with a lot of messy duplication in the history tree.

The fastest solution is to rebase one mirror into the other. Public rebasing isn’t the done thing as it’s bad practice to be changing the repository history when others could be working against it. However in this case we are looking to retire one history completely. I think, given that there’s only a little work in the forks, and the file content is the same it is the right solution.

So here are the steps I took to merge my mirror into the official one

• Forked and cloned the official bundle on github
• cd‘d to the root of the clone
• Added new remote using git remote add old-origin git@github.com:simongregory/ant-tmbundle.git
• Fetch the remote data git fetch old-origin
• Created old-master branch from the old-origin/master with git br old-master old-origin/master
• Checked out old-master git co old-master
• Rebased old-master onto master using git rebase master
• Switched back to master git co master
• Merged master with old-master git merge old-master
• Deleted the old-master branch git br -D old-master
• Created new sg branch git co -b sg
• Cherry picked the one commit I needed git cherry-pick 91f598
• Pushed the branch git push origin sg
• Removed the old-origin remote using git remote rm old-origin

Then to linked to the official TextMate remote using

• git remote add tm git@github.com:textmate/ant.tmbundle.git
• Fetched the remote data git fetch tm
• Checked master out git co master
• Synced master branches by pushing git push tm (only possible if you have write access)

One extra thing to note is the change from the old naming convention using a hyphen to a period.

There’s likely to be a better way of achieving this, but this is what worked for me. It won’t work if you have any private branches as you wouldn’t be able to pull them across. In this case I’d look at inverting the process and adding the new fork as a remote to the existing repository and merging from there.

The ActionScript 3 bundles had the ability to auto import a class for a long time, but the functionality has been limited to the area of the document between the package and class declarations. There have been some interesting solutions to improve this workflow, but ultimately it needed a more elegant solution.

If you grab the most recent version of the bundle you’ll now find that ⇧⌘I can be invoked from a wider scope and will present you with a list of possible classes to import based on the current word. Select one and an import statement for the class will be generated and injected into the document (or a tooltip saying the class is already imported).

I ought to stress that the importing is improved, but needs more work. The command is scoped to work within a public class, so any private classes hiding beneath your package block won’t benefit. You’re also likely, if you’re tidy, to want to organise the imports statements later on. But what is great about this is it let’s you skip a repetitive task and focus on higher level logic.