* G I T S Y N C

Commit and push your changes automatically!

Disclaimer: this is probably a terrible idea.

Installation (please don't)

• brew install fswatch (or however you wanna get it)
• cp gitsync /somewhere/in/your/path/
  • Or just invoke it directly.
  • Or just, y'know, don't.

Usage (seriously, just don't)

In an already-initialized git repo with a remote, gitsync .. Run it in the background or via tmux/screen if you have a good memory or enjoy surprises. (Or if you REALLY wanna have a bad time someday, hook it up to systemd.)

It doesn't matter where you run gitsync, as long as your working directory is somewhere in the git repo you're working with.

I am actually not sure whether it works as expected if you pass it a subdirectory of the git repo. I am also not sure whether I am going to bother figuring it out.

Reflections Upon First Use

This is definitely a terrible idea

I am scared to death of making typos

omg why would ANYBODY ever actually use this

If nothing else, at least it led me to discover this gem of the '90s

Is it cheating to reorder my thoughts, or post them out of order?

Welp, now I understand firsthand why Google Wave totally tanked.

I wonder how long until I get rate limited...

It's interesting to finally have exposed to me how nonlinear my edits tend to be: I've had a half-finished sub-thought for a previous point in my clipboard for a few commits now, because I have this instinct to keep my commits atomic. Pretty sure that's not really relevant here, but the thought persists.

^ UPDATE: still sittin' on the clipboard, lol

Gives a new perspective for that whole "nightly build" thing...

So the original idea behind this project was to reduce the friction between me and my git remotes, in order to avoid the problems that come up when I let my home directory configs get out of sync between machines. But at this point I can say with very definite certainty that it is not the solution I am looking for.

• It might still be decent if all operations were performed on a dedicated "_gitsync" branch, though.
  • In fact, for things like config files, totally: each machine could switch to the bleeding-edge _gitsync branch when desired, or hang out on master and wait for pull requests to get merged.
  • This would probably really help with stability, and encourage me to actually use branches and pull requests rather than just yolo'ing everything straight to master.
  • otoh, I have no idea how to actually delete stuff from git if I accidentally drop some secret data in here while the tool is running :\
• It also might still be pretty good for sharing notes on cool things I discover and keeping their published versions up to date.
  • Advantage over Notes.app/Dropbox: keeps track of when you make changes.
    • Obvs you can add timestamps to your additions, but that's a lot of overhead, both when editing and when reading. Also pretty hard to timestamp edits and deletes in a reasonable fashion.
  • Advantage over Slack: you can actually find the stuff you share later on, and it isn't limited to just your team.
  • Advantage over manually committing and pushing a repo: yeah I can never convince myself to actually do that.

Conclusion: ¯\(ツ)/¯

TODO

• avoid conflicts caused by other git processes
• pull before every commit?
  • autostash? (will that conflict with the active editor?)
  • how should it handle merge conflicts?
• commit messages should be *NSYNC lyrics