WordPress 4.0 Beta 1 is now available! Here are some of the changes:
Oh. My. God! I’ve been using git for years now and I only learned this today – git branch names support forward slashes! How awesome is that?! You can do things like this:
$ git checkout -b feature/foobar
Grouping branches like this is much easier indeed!
I came across this while reading CakeDC’s CakePHP Plugin Standard. Searching around to find more details, I see that there are a few potential issues with this naming convention, as tools occasionally break (composer, IDEs, etc). However, these problems are fixed by tool vendors. Looking into it even further, I found the following description in the book “Version Control with Git: Powerful tools and techniques for collaborative software development” (Google Books preview):
Dos and Don’ts in Branch Names
Branch names must conform to a few simple rules.
- You can use the forward slash (/) to create a hierarchical name scheme. However, the name cannot end with a slash.
- The name cannot start with a minus sign (-).
- No slash-separated component can begin with a dot (.). A branch name such as feature/.new is invalid.
- The name cannot contain two consecutive dots (..) anywhere.
- Further, the name cannot contain:
- Any space or other whitespace character
- A character that has special meaning to Git, including the tilde (~), caret (^), colon (:), question mark (?), asterisk (*), and open bracket ([).
- An ASCII control character, which is any byte with a value lower than \040 octal, or the DEL character (\177 octal)
These branch name rules are enforced by the git check-ref-format plumbing command, and they are designed to ensure that each branch name is both easily typed and usable as a filename within the .git directory and scripts.
So, as you can see, you aren’t even limited to the single forward slash. Even things like this work just fine:
$ git checkout -b Leonid/ideas/feature/foobar
But remember, just because you CAN do something, doesn’t necessarily mean you SHOULD. Have a look at this StackOverflow discussion about git branch naming best practices for more understanding on what you should and shouldn’t do.
The Architecture of Open Source Applications
Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another’s mistakes rather than building on one another’s successes.
Our goal is to change that. In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program’s major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think.
If you are a junior developer, and want to learn how your more experienced colleagues think, these books are the place to start. If you are an intermediate or senior developer, and want to see how your peers have solved hard design problems, these books can help you too.
There is also the fourth book in the works – 500 lines or less.
GifLinks – the best thing to happen to the internet since the <a> tag.
Intense Image Viewer – a JavaScript library for viewing images in a fully full screen.