How to manage multiple personal projects

How to manage multiple personal projects

[Paul Richards]

Hi,
I am currently using Subversion for my personal projects but am very
interested in moving to a DVCS (most likely Git).  The only
reservation I have is that I'm not sure how to map my current workflow
to Git.

Currently I have a single Subversion repository which holds all of my
work.  Typically when I experiment with something new I create a
directory at the top level of my repository, and start hacking away.
9 times out of 10 these experiments run for a few days then are never
touched again.  The directory will just sit there forever more in my
repository.  Occasionally one of these "projects" will keep me
interested for a while longer and so it will grow into something that
I work on for a longer period and I might publish. Publishing a URL
for a single project from my repository is very easy, as I can give a
URL which points to just the correct directory within the repository.
The third party doesn't see all my other junk unless they explicitly
navigate up the URL, nor do they end up checking out lots of stuff
related to other projects.

In short, with Subversion a single repository can hold multiple
projects very easily for me.  I myself typically just check out my
entire repository, but when I send links to others I typically only
send them the URL for the project of interest.

With Git, I'm not sure how this would work.  From what I understand
about branches and tags in Git is that they apply to the whole
repository.  And so it would not be advisable to store multiple
projects in a single repository.  I could choose to ignore this, and
store all my small projects in a single Git repository anyway, but I'm
not sure how I'd then allow others to checkout just a single project
directory.  (I presume they wouldn't be able to)

I believe the correct choice with Git is to create a repository per
project.  This would work OK for me, but I worry about the shear
number of repositories I'd end up creating.  Part of the nice thing
with my current Subversion setup is that starting a new project is
very easy and cheap, I don't create a new repository each time.

I think what might work with Git (and for which I'd like some advice)
is something inbetween.  I could have a single Git repository to hold
my small experiment projects where initially is where I always start
my work by creating a new directory.  Then if any of them start to
mature, I could move the project out into it's own repository for
real.  Would Git support this in some way tracking changes from one
repo to the other?  Or would I end up having to "replay" all the
commits from one repo to the other?

Thanks for reading so far, I'd appreciate any advice people have for this.

My Subersion repository is (temporarily) available publicly:
http://pauldoo.dyndns.org/svn/

Hopefully you might see how small many of these little projects are.
Occasionally though they grow into something larger that I do publish
(e.g. Proffy, Pigeon, Tuner).

-- 
Paul Richards

Re: How to manage multiple personal projects

[Avery Pennarun]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Paul Richards<paul.richards@gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe the correct choice with Git is to create a repository per
> project.  This would work OK for me, but I worry about the shear
> number of repositories I'd end up creating.  Part of the nice thing
> with my current Subversion setup is that starting a new project is
> very easy and cheap, I don't create a new repository each time.

Creating the repository for a git project is astonishingly cheap,
because the initial repository exists inside the source tree of the
project itself.  So you don't even have to decide in advance what to
name your project.  I'd say this is even easier than creating a new
svn directory.

You could then decide to publish your project (and go through a couple
of steps to do so) only if it's important enough.  Also, if you use
something like github.com, this part is really easy - and someone else
will pay the bandwidth costs.

> I think what might work with Git (and for which I'd like some advice)
> is something inbetween.  I could have a single Git repository to hold
> my small experiment projects where initially is where I always start
> my work by creating a new directory.  Then if any of them start to
> mature, I could move the project out into it's own repository for
> real.  Would Git support this in some way tracking changes from one
> repo to the other?  Or would I end up having to "replay" all the
> commits from one repo to the other?

Although I definitely recommend just making one git repo per project
in your case, you *could* do exactly what you describe above using
git-subtree:  http://github.com/apenwarr/git-subtree.  Disclosure: I
wrote git-subtree, so I like it by default.

However, doing this would only really be useful if your projects
cross-reference each other in some way.  My main motivation for
writing git-subtree, for example, is that I often end up building
useful tools that grow inside one of my other projects, then turn out
to be good on their own (or as part of another project).  So it's not
that I kept unrelated projects together for convenience (because it
really isn't any more or less convenient in git), but rather that I
wasn't able to predict the future, and git-subtree lets me change my
mind.

Have fun,

Avery

Re: How to manage multiple personal projects

[Jakub Narebski]

Paul Richards <paul.richards@gmail.com> writes:

[...]
> I believe the correct choice with Git is to create a repository per
> project.  This would work OK for me, but I worry about the shear
> number of repositories I'd end up creating.  Part of the nice thing
> with my current Subversion setup is that starting a new project is
> very easy and cheap, I don't create a new repository each time.
[...]

Perhaps 'repo' tool developed by Google will be what you want?

  http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=tools/repo.git
  http://newblogtopic.blogspot.com/2008/11/gerrit-and-repo-android-source_04.html 

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git