Shallow Thoughts : : Apr

Vermillion Cliffs trip, and other distractions

I haven't posted in a while. Partly I was busy preparing for, enjoying, then recovering from, a hiking trip to the Vermillion Cliffs, on the Colorado River near the Arizona/Utah border. We had no internet access there (no wi-fi at the hotel, and no data on the cellphone). But we had some great hikes, and I saw my first California Condors (they have a site where they release captive-bred birds). Photos (from the hikes, not the condors, which were too far away): Vermillion Cliffs trip.

I've also been having fun welding more critters, including a roadrunner, a puppy and a rattlesnake. I'm learning how to weld small items, like nail legs on spark plug dragonflies and scorpions, which tend to melt at the MIG welder's lowest setting.

New Mexico's weather is being charmingly erratic (which is fairly usual): we went for a hike exploring some unmapped cavate ruins, shivering in the cold wind and occasionally getting lightly snowed upon. Then the next day was a gloriously sunny hike out Deer Trap Mesa with clear long-distance views of the mountains and mesas in all directions. Today we had graupel -- someone recently introduced me to that term for what Dave and I have been calling "snail" or "how" since it's a combination of snow and hail, soft balls of hail like tiny snowballs. They turned the back yard white for ten or fifteen minutes, but then the sun came out for a bit and melted all the little snowballs.

But since it looks like much of today will be cloudy, it's a perfect day to use up that leftover pork roast and fill the house with good smells by making a batch of slow-cooker green chile posole.

Tags: travel, hiking
[ 12:28 Apr 29, 2016    More travel | permalink to this entry | ]

Modifying a git repo so you can pull without a password

There's been a discussion in the GIMP community about setting up git repos to host contributed assets like scripts, plug-ins and brushes, to replace the long-stagnant GIMP Plug-in Repository. One of the suggestions involves having lots of tiny git repos rather than one that holds all the assets.

That got me to thinking about one annoyance I always have when setting up a new git repository on github: the repository is initially configured with an ssh URL, so I can push to it; but that means I can't pull from the repo without typing my ssh password (more accurately, the password to my ssh key).

Fortunately, there's a way to fix that: a git configuration can have one url for pulling source, and a different pushurl for pushing changes.

These are defined in the file .git/config inside each repository. So edit that file and take a look at the [remote "origin"] section.

For instance, in the GIMP source repositories, hosted on git.gnome.org, instead of the default of url = ssh://git.gnome.org/git/gimp I can set

pushurl = ssh://git.gnome.org/git/gimp
url = git://git.gnome.org/gimp

(disclaimer: I'm not sure this is still correct; my gnome git access stopped working -- I think it was during the Heartbleed security fire drill, or one of those -- and never got fixed.)

For GitHub the syntax is a little different. When I initially set up a repository, the url comes out something like url = git@github.com:username/reponame.git (sometimes the git@ part isn't included), and the password-free pull URL is something you can get from github's website. So you'll end up with something like this:

pushurl = git@github.com:username/reponame.git
url = https://github.com/username/reponame.git

Automating it

That's helpful, and I've made that change on all of my repos. But I just forked another repo on github, and as I went to edit .git/config I remembered what a pain this had been to do en masse on all my repos; and how it would be a much bigger pain to do it on a gazillion tiny GIMP asset repos if they end up going with that model and I ever want to help with the development. It's just the thing that should be scriptable.

However, the rules for what constitutes a valid git passwordless pull URL, and what constitutes a valid ssh writable URL, seem to encompass a lot of territory. So the quickie Python script I whipped up to modify .git/config doesn't claim to handle everything; it only handles the URLs I've encountered personally on Gnome and GitHub. Still, that should be useful if I ever have to add multiple repos at once. The script: repo-pullpush (yes, I know it's a terrible name) on GitHub.

Tags: programming, git, github, python
[ 12:28 Apr 05, 2016    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]