I have been trying to get a grip on the Pennykoin CLI code base for some time. One of the problems that I’ve had is that the original developer had a lot of false starts and stops, and there’s a lot of orphan branches like this:
If that wasn’t bad enough, at some point they decided to push the current code to a new repo, and lost the entire starting commit history. Whether this was intentional or not, I can’t say. It’s made it very tricky for me to backtrack through the history of the code and figure out where bugs were introduced. So problem number one that I’m dealing with is how to link these two repos together so that I have a complete history to search through.
Merging two branches
So we had two repos, which we’ll call pk_old and pk_new. I originally tried methods where I tried to merge the repos together using branches, but I either wound up with the old repo as the last commit, or with the new repo and none of the old history. I spent a lot of time going over my bash history file and playing with using my local directories as remote sources, deleting and starting over. Then I was able to find out that there was indeed a common commit between these two repos, and that all I had to do was add the old remote with the –tags option to pull in everything.
mkdir pk_redux cd pk_refresh git init git remote add -f pk_new https://github.com/Pennykoin/Pennykoin-old.git --tags git merge pk_new/master git remote add -f pk_old https://github.com/Pennykoin/Pennykoin-old.git --tags
Now, I probably could have gotten away by just cloning the pk_new repo instead of initializing an empty directory and adding the remote, but we the end result should be the same. A quick check of the tags between the two original repos and my new one showed that everything was there.
Phantom branches
One of the things that we have to do as part of our pk_redux, as we’re calling it, is setup new repos that we actually have control over. This time around, everything will be setup properly as part of governance, so that I’m not the only one with keys to the kingdom in case I go missing. I want to take advantage of GitLab’s integrated CI/CD, as we’ve talked about before, so I setup a new group and pkcli repo. I pushed the code base up, and saw all the tags, but none of the branches were there.
The issue ultimately comes down to the fact that git branches are just pointers to a specific commit in a repository’s history. Git will pull the commits down from a remote as part of a fetch job, but not the pointers to those branches unless I physically checked them out. Only after I created these tracking branches on my local repo could I then push them to the new remote origin.
Fixing Pennykoin
So now that I’ve got a handle on this repo, my next step is to hunt some bugs. I’ll probably have to do some more work to try and de-orphan some of these early commits in the repo history, cause that will be instrumental in tracking down changes to the Cryptonote parameters. These changes are likely the cause for the boostrap issue that exists. And my other priority is figuring out if we can unlock the bugged coins. From there I’d like to implement a test suite, and make sure that there is are proper branching workflows for code changes.