The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, November 13, 2017

It shouldn't be this hard to deploy a new version

I spent more time fighting git and Github than I did in writing the code to support the JSON Feed. Yeah, the code was straightforward and I had it done rather quickly. Deploying the code was something else entirely.

So I finished the code, and the new templates to generate the feed and my tests were good and life was fine. I then committed my changes to git and that's where the first problem occured—not all the changes were committed! The issue came down to an overbroad directive to git to ignore a certain file—it was a general “ignore all files of the given name” instead of “ignore this one file” that I forgot about. So I tagged the release (version 5.0.0), pushed the changes to Github (for public consumption of the source code) and then went to update the copy of mod_blog on the server. It was there when I discovered the critical missing file (one of the templates for the new JSON Feed).

Sigh.

I had been a bit too hasty in pushing the code out to Github, so now I was stuck with releasing version 5.0.1. Only now something got munged up with my copy of the code on the server since it compiled the program with a version number of 5.0.0-1-gd096362 instead of a version number of 5.0.1.

A bit of background: I use git to tag versions, and in the Makefile I have the following bit of code:

VERSION := $(shell git describe --tag)

...

override CFLAGS  +=-DPROG_VERSION='"$(VERSION)"'

so I don't have to update the version number in code by hand (the override exists so I can specify different compiler flags and still have the version information propagated to the program; I also handle the case when git isn't available, but that comes in later in my tale of woe). Running git tag showed a tag of 5.0.1, but git describe --tag was only coming up with 5.0.0-1-gd096362.

Wat?

Did I not update things properly? Was it a problem with the version of git on the server? Did I lose the signal? Was it lost in translation? Wat?

Some quick changes, try version 5.0.2. That worked—kind of. Now on the server the version was reporting back version 5.0.1.

Then I discovered another issue. I have code in the Makefile to handle the case when the version number isn't available through git—it's just a check to see if git describe --tag returned anything and if not, use a hard coded version specified in the Makefile. Now, to prevent me from pushing an update to Github with an incorrect version number in the Makefile, I have a script that is supposed to run when I push changes to Github (specifically, when I push changes to a remote host). Only the last change to that script rendered it non-executable, so it wasn't running. The version on Github had the wrong version number specified in the Makefile, and I was still having this weird “one version back” problem on the server.

I was still having problems with version 5.0.3 when I gave up. I wanted a nice, clean, 5.0.0 release, and instead, I was on my way to version 5.0.137 the way things were going. And all because I didn't check in a critical file because of a typo. If only I hadn't pushed the code to Github so quickly. If only there were a way to remove the tagged versions from Github, but there didn't seem to be an obvious way to me.

As I eventually found out, there was a way—from the command line on my development machine, I just had to run this blindingly obvious sequence of commands:

GenericUnixPrompt> git tag -d 12345
GenericUnixPrompt> git push origin :refs/tags/12345

Obvious.

I'm surprised I didn't realize that sooner.

So I removed the tags for versions 5.0.3, 5.0.2, 5.0.1, and 5.0.0, made sure I had all the files and whatnot, and re-released version 5.0.0.

Good Lord!

So now all is right with the world, and I have a new JSON Feed file.

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