Monthly Archives: March 2011

Ditz – the distributed issue tracker

ditz, , , ,

If you are using a distributed version control system 1 you get some really cool benefits and some really strange problems.

When I was toying around on a project with Aaron, I fell in love with ditz. We needed a quick way to keep track of bugs, without taking the time to set up a central bug repository. We wanted a bug tracker that could live in the same place as the code, where adding a friend to kick in on code didn’t require more accounts being set up and maintained.

Ditz did all of that, works straight from the command line, and even outputs some sweet html pages for display to the world.

Ditz is kind of abandonware right now as the original author has gone on to other things – but the state it is in right now is just perfect for my personal projects. If you are using it, I’ve added an RSS feed for the html output.

And the really good news? I just convinced the maintainer to make me a co-maintainer. So that means that I can integrate features! Once we get enough in for a new release, I’ll post an update right here!

  1. like git or darcs or mercurial, etc.   (back)

What to do when you get detached from your head, you git.

Dev, Hacks,

I found myself wandering about detached from my head, fully committed. You don’t want to commit when detached from head, but I had.

I didn’t know how it happened, but there I was, headless. What a silly, silly git.

I reached out to a friendly spider and the answer was there in the web.
Before you wander back to your head, it is important to mount yourself to a branch, then you can use that branch to reattach your head quite easily.
Here is how the magic incantations go:

git checkout -b the_wanderer
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge the_wanderer
git commit

I’ve tied the branch to where I am, then grabbed where I was and attached that, then bound everything back together.
Clear as mud? Already done git checkout master? Check the spellbook that inspired me.