Re: Locally manage user/branch setting files without pushing them remotely

[Yann Simon <yann.simon.fr@gmail.com>]

2009/11/11 Daniele Segato <daniele.bilug@gmail.com>:
> I had a situation I don't know how to manage with Git.
>
> The project has a lot of setting that are really binded to the user
> and should not go pushed in a remote repository (example: database
> connections parameters / filesystem paths)
> We have a .template file for those settings but the actual settings
> are really binded to the user environment.
> I added those files to the .gitignore but now I can't keep an history
> of them and I can't use different version of them in different
> branches.
>
> I tell you what's the real situation but I will simplify things a
> little, suppose I only have two branches: master and experiments.
>
> I've a java application and some ANT script to automatizations like
> compiling, packaging and deploying stuffs.
>
> On my system I had two application servers and two databases one for
> "master" and the other for "experiment".
> There is a property files with the path of the two application servers
> and the parameters to connect at the DB.
>
> The ant script automatically deploy on the right application server
> and automatically set the properties to connect at the right database.
>
> This allow me to clean my experimantal database everytimes I need to
> and start over by a clean situation and keep the "master" one
> populated with all the data so I can do stress test/update procedures
> test and so on...
>
> At the moment I manually modify that property files when I checkout
> one of the two branches and I need to deploy it to test or whatever.
>
>
>
> Is there a way with Git to automatically switch that file when i
> switch through branches?
> It would be really perfect if I could also keep version of that file
> so that when I checkout an old commit I had the options I was using
> when I was testing that commit.
>
> Ideally that means that should be some files that are kept within each
> commit but they are not pushed to a remote repository.
> (Even if i'm talking about pushing I'm using git-svn because my
> company still use SVN as versioning system so I don't push but i do
> git svn dcommit when committing on a remote repository)
>
> How do you manage situation like this?

I am in the same situation.
What I did is not to add these files to .gitignore.
On my "work" branch, I commited these files in a separate commit
"local changes".
When I want to push to svn, I switch to the branch "master", and
cherry-pick the commit I want to push.
$ git checkout master
$ git svn rebase
$ git cherry-pick work
$ git svn dcommit
$ git checkout work
$ git rebase master

This workflow could maybe be better. Suggestions welcome.

Yann