Yahoo identifies five different competitiveness levels for social communities (Caring, Collaborative, Cordial, Competitive, Combative) and recommends different ways of handling reputation in your system based on the behavior of its users. I found it very insightful to break down behavior in this way as point systems work better in competition, for example, while named labels help in caring and collaborative situations. Looking forward to more of this sort of stuff from Yahoo! Original blog post at the yuiblog.

Working with svn branches via git

Assuming you’ve properly cloned your svn repository, you should have your trunk and remote branches fetched from svn. You can see the remote branches via

git branch -r

If you have colorization turned on, then

git branch -a

Will give you all your branches (local and remote) and color the remote ones in red. The way you want to work is to create a local git branch for every svn branch you’re working with. So you might do something like

git branch local-trunk trunk
git branch local-1.5 branches/1.5

This will create two local branches (called local-trunk, and local-1.5 respectively) that follow the corresponding remote branches (trunk, and branches/1.5).

Now we’ll switch to the trunk…

git checkout local-trunk

Do some hacking, and commit the change

git commit -a -m "this is my hack"

Let’s say this was a bugfix and you also need to apply it to the branch. Switch to the branch:

git checkout local-1.5

To pull individual fixes from trunk you can cherry-pick the fix by its commit hash, which you obtained when you committed or via a log.

git cherry-pick 234adsfa7s8dfasdf

This will automatically pull in the change and commit it to your branch. If you don’t want to immediately commit but want to mess with the files first, then use the -n switch, which merges in the fix but doesn’t commit it. Then you’ll want to git svn dcommit to push your change out to the svn branch. This procedure is much faster than using svnmerge.py.

Nonstandard or wacky branch structure

It so happens that my repository is set up in a slightly nonstandard way due to a particular legacy. Instead of having a structure such as foo/trunk and foo/branches, I have trunk/foo and branches/[branchname]/foo. As it turns out, git supports this very well as long as you specify the format using wildcards in your .git/config

[svn-remote "svn"]
  url = http://www.myrepo.com/svn/parent
  fetch = trunk/foo:refs/remotes/foo/trunk
  branches = branches/*/foo:refs/remotes/foo/branches/*

The format of this file basically has two parts separated by a colon. The first part tells git what the repo looks on the svn side. The second tells it what to call the branches that git creates to correspond to the ones out in svn. You’ll notice the placement of the wildcard on the third line is what generates all the branches correctly.

Note: Please see all posts tagged git for the rest of the series.

What’s interesting here is that social search is an emergent behavior of del.icio.us, which was designed primarily as a remote bookmarking tool. In the del.icio.us lesson on bokardo, Josh points out that “personal value precedes network value”. By optimizing for the bookmarking (personal) experience, yet making the early decision of keeping everything public by default, del.icio.us surfaces a gold mine of the “best of the best on the web”, and thus becomes exceptionally useful as a filtered search engine.

Because most of the data is put on del.icio.us for selfish reasons, it is by and large very high quality source of information. Del.icio.us is not easily ‘gamed’ by things like SEO because in order for your link to be popular, other people have to actually want to bookmark it as well. Thus I am inclined to trust a highly bookmarked result on del.icio.us over a highly ranking one on Google.

If Yahoo was smart, they would be integrating del.icio.us search results into their main search engine. Of course I would rather see Google do this but it so happens that Yahoo owns del.icio.us so a Google deal is less likely (yet not impossible in this mashed-up world). While Google continues to be a great place to start a random day, del.icio.us is becoming more and more my place to go when looking for a specific type of result.