Deciphering life: One bit at a time

So the Bioconductor SVN repo is set up in the standard trunk / branches way, but as a developer, you only have write access to your package directory, which is either in "trunk/x/x/packageName" (dev) or "branches/releaseNum/x/x/packageName" (release). This is not what Git is expecting if you want to enable keeping track of release and dev in the same Git repository. How do you set it up so you can keep track of everything in a single repository like you might normally want?

I found some suggestions here, and show them below:

Clone your SVN repo:

git svn clone https://svnRepo/trunk/x/x/packageName packageName

Now add information about the branches:

git config --add svn-remote.releaseNum.url https://svnRepo/branches/releaseNum/x/x/packageName/
git config --add svn-remote.releaseNum.fetch :refs/remotes/releaseNum/

Now fetch and create a local branch tied to the remote:

git svn fetch releaseNum
git checkout -b local-releaseNum -t releaseNum

From these two branches, you should be able to create normal Git branches, work and modify them, and then go back and merge changes, rebase, and dcommit as usual. Although I'm sure you could clone each of these into separate git repos, you would then lose the ability to do a diff between them. I hope this saves someone else from searching over the web for a couple of hours.

Originally posted on my Wiki.

For anyone who is using RStudio, there are some new features to note in the next release (0.95).

1 - Multiple projects, multiple RStudio instances

If you are like me and often have large things running, and want to work on something else, then it is nice to be able to have multiple instances (copies if you will) of the editor and programming environment running. I often find myself working on multiple projects, and I don't like shutting down and coming back to something when all I really need is 10 minutes to work on the other thing. So I was very happy to see that you can now fire up multiple copies of RStudio. You can even tie particular instances of RStudio to a particular project, with its associated files, and history.

2 - Integrated version control

I admit, I don't use version control nearly as much as I should, I still tend to depend on keeping old bits of code in files and then running the pieces that I need. But version control has gotten a lot easier with integrated versioning in RStudio using Git or SVN. I had been using Mercurial, but due to the built in integration with Git, am switching over (not hard, I only had like one directory that was actually using vc). What is really sweet about it, is that you can just create a project based on a current directory, and say you want to use VC, and it will initialize it and restart RStudio, and you are good to go.
One reason I will be using Git over SVN is the ability to stick with local repositories, whereas SVN would require a whole server set up on my machine or somewhere else. And it seems pretty easy to use.

As of 1500 EST on 20/01/12, the download page still showed the old version, but the documentation for version control is up. If you want to get the version with projects and version control as a preview release here http://www.rstudio.org/download/preview.

Edit: The new version is available on the main download page.