More Rebasing

Wew. Who knew that a simple exercise on rebasing could cause so much difficulty. But, after all this class time, I think I have a solid understanding of it now. Rebasing is a pretty useful tool to incorporate changes from branch to branch due to its replication of project history. It’s a good way to have a cohesive list of changes for your branches, eliminating extraneous merg commits that may bog down the history.

Prior to our Wednesday class on the exercise, I thought rebasing could be used to incorporate changes from one branch to master. But, while you technically can, this is bad practice as rebasing master, i.e. the public branch every collaborator sees, will rewrite master’s history, but only for your forked repo. Your now diverged master branches will cause plentiful issues and clunkiness when trying to collaborate with others.

From my understanding, merging is the way to go when incorporating changes from another branch to master. Indeed, when pull requests are resolved and accepted, they are often merged.

Sidenote: Git, Terminal, and Command Line

During the rebasing exercise, I got to do a lot of practice with Git and terminal commands that helped me a ton. I feel much more comfortable with Git and some basic terminal commands thanks to constantly rummaging around in Git Bash. But this got me thinking, “Wow, does it kind of suck to be on a Windows machine as a developer.”

Why do I say that? Because the Unix terminal is such a core part of being a developer. Many developer tools are run through terminal on Unix, such as, you guessed it, Git or even Python. And they run on terminal natively! I wish stuff like Git and Python ran on the Windows Command Line or PowerShell natively. No, on Windows, instead, we have to install a new environment for basically everything, or just do a lot more finagling to get tools that run natively on Unix to work correctly on Windows.

One of these days I’m gonna either try dual-booting Linux on my laptop or switch to Mac. Now that we have so much time on our hands due to COVID isolation, maybe I’ll experiment a bit with dual-booting Linux distros…

First Group Meeting for Tuxemon!

We had a great first meeting for working on our project, Tuxemon! Everyone was enthusiastic about the project, and we actually went over the amount of time we set for the group meeting. Good sign.

It helps a lot that a good portion of what we were doing was playing around with the compiled game, searching for un-reported bugs and possible feature suggestions that we could possibly contribute with. This fun aspect of our work definitely kept us engaegd and positvely affected our productivity. We compiled a pretty lengthly list of ideas, so we have a pretty decent base to go off of for future meetings where we start physically contributing to the project with code and bugfixes.

While we did all join Tuxemon’s Discord server, we still haven’t established our voices in the project community yet, so that is definitely something we’ll start doing ASAP. Other things we’ll definitely need to start doing is actually report and suggest the bugs and feature suggestions we compiled to the project, as those are easy small contributions we can make to help fill our contribution bucket, if you will. We have a solid plan for contributing to Tuxemon, and I can’t wait to start getting a crack on those more meaningful contributions and really find a place in this tiny, yet passionate community.