chrishowie.com

There have been many good changes in my life recently. It’s been almost three months since I graduated college, and nearly two since I got married. Well, now I have another for the list.

For two years I’ve been working at Ontario Systems as an intern. The first year and a half were a lot of fun. I was coding PHP and Flex/ActionScript on a team of two other developers (one also my manager). However, I’ve been unable to secure a full-time job offer since graduating and have been continuing work as an intern, which pays enough to cover the bills, but not much more. Additionally, the company’s partnership with Microsoft means that pretty much all of the Linux servers are in the cross-hairs, so to speak. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that my current role of PHP developer and interim Linux sysadmin is not exactly going to be permanent.

Last week I had the privilege of accepting a full-time job offer from Aprimo and will be starting work with them on July 27th. They are also a Microsoft shop, but I will be working on the development team and coding C#, which I’ve been hacking with for some years now. The company looks to be doing well, and the people I’ve met so far have been very friendly and welcoming. The developers I’ve talked to all seem very knowledgeable, and I’m looking forward to working with them.

I’m not sure which I’m excited about more: getting to work at Aprimo, or finally ending my job hunt. Both are pretty cool. I will miss my friends at Ontario Systems (we’ve had some pretty good times) but I am definitely looking forward to the future.

First some backstory…

I had a public and a private Subversion repository on my web server, and when I started a new project I’d import it into one of them. This is nice because I get versioning and history, plus I get implicit synchronization between my various development boxen.

It’s not unusual to have one monolithic Subversion repository for many different projects, mainly because setting up a Subversion repository can take a small bit of work, especially if you are serving it from HTTP. However, Git makes it so easy to create new repositories that there is no excuse not to create per-project repositories, not to mention that you should anyway since Git doesn’t support checking out a subdirectory of a repository. You simply can’t use a monolithic Git repository because you have to clone the whole big tree, even if you only plan on working on one subdirectory.

Since Git is so much more awesome, I plan on converting my Subversion repositories over. But what do I do with the multi-project ones? There’s no built-in mechanism for pulling out just one directory, with history, into a new repository. So I wrote one.

The usage is git-pluck src-repo dest-repo path/to/directory. The script copies the repository at src-repo to a new directory, dest-repo, and then does its magic. It rewrites all of the commits so that all of the files in path/to/directory are moved into the root of the repository, and everything else is deleted. Commits that do not introduce changes to that directory are removed from the history, potentially including the first commit to the repository. Finally, the reflogs and backups are removed and the repository is compacted, leaving you with a small, single-project repository.

This script was written and tested using Git 1.5.6.5. Feedback is welcome!