Create and delete branches | Hacker News Reader

Create and delete branches

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126 pointsnicolasd25 comments

Suddenly I can clearly see what must be one of Github's long-term goals: to make git usable end-to-end in the browser, and in a way where that is preferable for certain situations.

We're going to continue spending more and more of our computer time in the browser. It's the universal platform.

Git in the browser is exactly what we need to bring git outside programming circles.

What I've wanted for a while is a site where I could fork somebody's muffin recipe, fix stuff and so on ... I've even considered building a site like that, but how many people who cook are also handy enough with a console to make that viable? My guess is not many.

Hahah, recipes are actually a very interesting application. A program is much like a recipe, after all. I could see a collaborative site where you build up a personal cookbook by forking and trying out other peoples' stuff and contributing your own modifications, etc.

If you think recipes are like code, you should look at knitting patterns sometime. It looks like assembly code to me.

I have a grandmother who can debug knitting patterns.

The patterns in the books are, apparently, sometimes wrong somehow. She debugs them when she knits.

I can only imagine every competent knitter can, if only because those books must sell to a huge number of them.

Fork a recipe, pun intended? ;)

Edit: call it gitmeafork.com! (sorry for the bad joke!)

That's a brilliant joke.

The Setup Interview with Jonas M. Luster [0]:

  I know I am not the only one but there aren't many
  chefs who keep all their recipes in hand-written XML
  checked into a Git repository and run XQuery queries
  over it for Christmas dinner menu ideas.

[0] http://jonas.m.luster.usesthis.com/

I'm looking to make a simple Gist like application that tracks revision history as well. It's for a specific use case, but I'm sure it could apply in other places as well.

Git in the browser via GitHub has been very useful in helping some of our entrenched IT folks start using Git to manage system config files. Yes, in the long run they should just learn Git, but in the meantime this allows us to use version control at all with them, which is a great thing.

At my last company we got our artists using git. We set up projects for art assets, which we included as submodules in our main project.

We fake our designer using Git. He has access to each repo's view and static asset files through a Samba share. Every afternoon we ssh in and commit his changes. When he says stuff is in good shape for the next release we merge his branch to staging. And whenever it's a good time, we merge stag down onto his branch so he has all the newest stuff.

So far it's worked great.

SparkleShare (http://sparkleshare.org/) uses Github to replicate Dropbox functionality; could you use the SparkleShare client on your designer's workstation so that when assets are created/updated/saved, they are automatically committed to your repo?

Thanks, I'll look into that.

Awesome! Let me know how it works out!

The git support isn't that user friendly, but you can always use cloud9 as an online ide with your github account.

My gut reaction to this was negative. As much as I like GitHub, I sympathise a lot with Linus Torvalds' concerns about the way it encourages low-quality pull requests [1].

However, thinking back through my own experiences with the kind of minor pull requests I've occasionally made to projects in the past, I can see this being quite useful. Have you ever actually cloned a big repo like the kernel's? Even the Node.js repo takes a fair old while. If you're just trying to submit a correction for a minor typo or omission in the project's README, then this feature lowers the barrier from minutes to seconds. Hopefully that will be a net positive for the community.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56599...

Why do you sympathize with his concerns? As valid as they are for the kernel they aren't for most of the projects hosted on GitHub. Most people are happy to get a pull request at all, and when they get one it's usually some trivial fix they can merge automatically.

> low-quality pull requests

Many people who put out open source projects would be glad to get any pull requests at all. Linus has just a very popular open source project and he's got problems we other guys would love to have to worry about.

Slight self promotion; here is a CLI tool I made to help clear up local and remote branches easily - in case it is still useful to people:

https://github.com/elliottcarlson/git-delete-branch

I can't believe it. I was looking for this functionality just yesterday and now here it is.

Delete a branch in the UI, thank you!

The create is nice, but the delete is absolutely essential. Thanks for implementing this.

Don't forget to run `git fetch --prune` after someone deletes a remote branch.

You guys are awesome! Thank you so much :)

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