Recovering from Corrupt Revisions in an SVN Repository

Recently, I worked to recover a client’s corrupted SVN repository. While the best protection against repository corruption is good backups, these are not always up-to-date or intact. Unless there are backups, repository corruption will almost certainly result in some data loss. However, by working around corrupt revisions, it may be possible to restore the repository […]

Interacting with Git: Cryptic RPC Errors, HTTPS, and SSH

In my experience, working with a Git repository hosted by Gitlab, Github, or Gitorious has generally been issue free and enjoyable. Recently, however, three members of my team ran across the same cryptic RPC error when trying to push changes to a remote repository on Gitlab: error: RPC failed; result=22, HTTP code = 411error: RPC […]

Sharpen Your Git Saw – Aliases, Selective Staging, & Interactive Rebasing

Git is a powerful tool that we love as developers. It’s also complicated. I consider the bare essentials of Git, the minimum set of features to be familiar with before we can be productive, to be all of this: local interaction: status, add, remove, commit, reset, checkout branch management: checkout, merge remote interaction: clone, fetch, […]

Lessons from an SVN Server Migration

Recently, we rebuilt Atomic’s SVN server. We wanted to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu LTS release and also wanted to manage the server with Chef. Provisioning the server and bootstrapping it with Chef was straightforward. However, actually preparing the server for hosting our SVN repositories and migrating all of the data posed some challenges. I […]

Git-SVN Gotcha with Empty Directories

This short post is intended to serve as a warning about a potential gotcha with git-svn, and how to prevent it. An Anecdote First, a sort of “postmortem” of my run-in with this issue: I was working to migrate an old SVN repository full of documents to Git. We had decided that we didn’t need […]

Moving Unpushed Changes to a New Branch with Mercurial

So you’ve been studiously committing your changes early and often only to discover that, for whatever reason, you really wished you’d been committing your changes to a different branch. Now what do you do? Is there a way we can just move unpushed changes onto a new branch? Actually, Yes! 1. Make a Backup First […]

Merging git Repositories Together

Until recently, my current project had maintained two distinct git repositories, one for each of the major components of the project. For a few reasons, we decided that it would be best to merge them into a single git repository. Ideally, we wanted to do so in such a way that would preserve the full […]

Obliterate Unsavory git Objects with the BFG

Sometimes we accidentally commit things to git that we shouldn’t. Passwords. Keys. Other sensitive data. Photoshop files. Intermediate object files. Other big binary data. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t work well in git, and since git (conservatively and justifiably) makes it difficult to destroy data, we end up with these anchors slowing us […]

Splitting an SVN Repository

Occasionally, a subversion repository may start to become too large and cumbersome to work with easily. If the repository contains a large amount of data, it may take a great deal of time to perform certain operations, such as checking out the entire repository at once. It may make sense to split the repository to […]

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