Recurse Center, 2014-07-28

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 22:23:39 -0400

There seemed to be excitement in the space to have Jessica around. We had coffee with her, and I chatted with her briefly. She encouraged me to try and send a patch to CPython, that involved debugging and fixing some C issues.
I spent some time with Tom, while he tried to get cinspect working for him, and it seemed like having the developer next to you, helped. As always. We didn’t make any fixes to the code, but it worked.
I spent the afternoon, adding tests for a simple issue, to see how patches are sent.
Later, I paired with Sophia for an hour to refactor the vcs code. It’s beginning to look much better than what it used to, and I like that.
Jessica’s talk on buffer overflows was enlightening and entertaining. It was very similar to a talk that Max gave on one of the thursdays, but it was exciting nevertheless.
After the talk, I am inspired to try and work through the Hacking: Art of exploitation, at some point. I’m beginning to feel like time at HackerSchool running out!

A git-diff tip

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0530

One of the things with git that you can mess-up, if you are not used to, is git diff. A friend of mine was trying to add a couple of new files, and changes to existing files. But, he was on the wrong branch, and wanted to change to a different branch, before committing. Being new to git, he wanted to take a patch. Reset the changes, apply the patch back.

This is what he did

git add new_file.txt
git add old_file1.txt old_file2.txt # don't add old_file3.txt

Oh, damn, I want to change the branch.

git diff > a.patch
git reset --hard
git checkout other-branch

Let me commit my changes…

git apply a.patch
git commit -m
git show

Oh crap! Where are my new files? They aren’t commited! Lemme add them.

ls new_file.txt
ls: cannot access new_file.txt: No such file or directory

Dammit! Where are my changes gone?

The problem was with git diff. It gives only the only the un-staged changes. --cached option has to specified, to get the staged changes in the diff output. git diff HEAD shows diff output with both staged and un-staged changes.

But the whole workflow above is a beginners workflow. A user comfortable with git would’ve committed and then moved the commit around using cherry-pick or the like.

git add <all-files>
git commit -m "My awesome changes."  #committed on branch1
git checkout other-branch
git cherry-pick branch1

Version-Control on Noetic Nought

Recurse Center, 2014-07-28

A git-diff tip