Technical support

changed milestone to %Orientation

mentioned in merge request !3 (closed)

@daniel.mcdonald I am super confused (as usual): I saw in my mailbox that you wrote a comment (offering to help me) and tagged me in it but somehow I can't seem to find it anywhere. Anyways: yes, I tried to put Manuels and mine "Project Idea"-Issue together since we want to work on something together. I just clicked on some buttons and it didn't work and I don't know what happenend. Sorry!

No need to apologise, it's fine. This is where I commented: !3 (closed)

Let me know if there's something you're trying to do and I am happy to help you through it. Yes, one way to do it would be to create a branch like you did, and @manuel.kissoczy could also fetch this branch; you could both push and pull to that branch, or make other branches and merge them into the one you share. If your project doesn't need any digizeit materials, you can use gitlab to create a whole new repository for your project, clone that one, and add files there...

@manuel.kissoczy had connection issues for our course today. Here he can post any issues he has when trying out the fork -> add content to fork -> push updates -> make merge request from fork to origin process...

mentioned in issue #22

@daniel.mcdonald I'm currently encountering 2 problems:

The first is regarding Atom. I set up Atom earlier this morning and did everything we already had. So cloning the Repository, setting up another SSH-key, etc. Now my currently problem arises when I try to push the changes I committed to the master. When I do this I get an error message saying that my push was rejected because:

The tip of your current branch is behind its remote counterpart. Try pulling before pushing.

I've tried to solve the problem, but so far I've been unsuccessful. The internet advice suggests different things in the terminal, but because I don't understand what exactly some of those do I'm being careful and waiting for feedback.

The second problem is Linux-specific. Because I use SWITCHdrive as my cloud-service of choice, which doesn't have a Linux client, I have to use the ownCloud client, the basis for SWITCHdrive. But when I try to install I receive the following error message.

Again searching for a solution online hasn't helped, though people with very similar problems have found solutions. For example.

Any input is appreciated, I'll keep trying to resolve the issues.

The tip of your current branch is behind its remote counterpart. Try pulling before pushing.

Regarding this first issue, this isn't any kind of computer bug, it's just saying that where you're working has fallen behind (in terms of commits) where you want to push it, so you can't push it until you first pull in the new changes. Pulling first will incorporate the changes made by others into your local version, then you can try push again.

i.e. type git pull first and see what happens, either it will fix things or tell you there is a conflict, which we can then work through...

Alright I did that and it showed a conflict. From what I understand is that my computer doesn't know with which branch of the project it's supposed to merge with. So the there is some information missing for the pull/push process to work, correct?

Oh, this is not a conflict yet, sorry.

It's saying, you need to specify where to pull from exactly (which remote and which branch). Try setting the upstream URL and then pulling from its master

git remote set-url https://gitlab.uzh.ch/lit/digizeit.git
git pull origin master

Protip, try to read these messages very carefully. Git terminology can be difficult, but the info you need is in these error messages, it's just that the messages speak a very terminology-laden dialect of hacker English.

So after a little try and error (I think this will be a common occurrence in the future) I think I found the issue. I can't push anything to the master because of the reduced editing rights. Connecting the branch which I made for my Linux the (patch-1) it all works fine. I tried editing henrik.md for the master in the GitLab interface, which only works if I make a new branch.

@daniel.mcdonald Could this be the issue?

I think with Linux, there is always more to learn. Probably Linux best suits the kind of people who naturally want to learn more and more, especially about the tools they use and so on. I think it's kind of sad that other OSes (operating systems) try to minimise learning. Almost everybody uses their OS really inefficiently, even though they use it for dozens of hours a week. Seems to me like people would really benefit from classes teaching advanced OS skills.

Yes, you shouldn't be able to push to lit/digizeit:master for security reasons. You should branch or fork. I am happy to merge as many merge requests (MRs) as you make, and prefer them to be sort of atomic, so I can quickly understand what the MR is for. So go ahead check out as many branches/forks as you want, there's no harm in having 100 branches and a fork (which itself could have branches!)

The learning curve is really steep and I think it can be really intimidating to lose the pretty interfaces and interfere with the inner working of an OS, but I think there is much to gain. For example making adjustments to Gnome (the desktop-interface of Ubuntu) is really easy and can be individualized to fit specific needs. This is something which is only possible to a very limited degree in Windows. Something I really think is annoying in Windows are the unnecessary system notifications or not being able to uninstall certain programs for whatever reason. In Ubuntu I can do whatever I want (though of course with great power comes great responsibility). I think learn term my productivity will improve through the streamlining the OS to my needs.

I think the error message just was misleading that I assumed it was an issue with my remote setup. But it's good to know, as other people will maybe run into the same issue.

@daniel.mcdonald Is there any easy way of copying and pasting (for want of a better term) our discussions in Issues into a README.md file? I'm struck by how many good points have been raised now in our discussions of both VTM and also Seshat, and it would be good to have these all in a single file in the Repository at some point.

I would export the Issues to some kind of plain text like format, and then edit/copy-paste from that

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/csv_export.html

But beware of doing stuff like this, especially for open issues, things are still subject to change, you don't want to be editing the same minor thing in two places. The README could also just hyperlink to the relevant parts of Issues too? Though I admit that has some downsides.

Also consider if it should be Wiki content. Obviously, unlike other projects, we don't have a clear divide between what should be in repo and what should be in wiki, so it's a judgement call...

OK, good--I'll maybe wait until the end of the course, in that case.

Yes, best to do it once I think. My thinking is it'd be nicest if it ended up in the Wiki, because there is no upper limit to sensible document size there (you can make new pages and so on). README.md is customarily not all that long, just has the most general overview of the point of the repo.

@daniel.mcdonald I was able to fix the ownCloud installation problem. I think I accessed the wrong version for Ubuntu 18.04. By adding the correct repository and installing it manually the unmet dependencies were resolved.

Glad you fixed it, nice one.

Did you explain to me somewhere what you're using OwnCloud for? Seems like a nice tool and is open source, but if you want to host files, why not use Git?

That said, If your files are large then I agree that Git is not the place to do it ... Git is designed for text/code, not videos, large binaries, etc.. I should explain the reasons why in class sometime.

@daniel.mcdonald This relates to question (i) I asked in #26

Ah, it's just that the cloud service I use for basically all the work I do for Uni or in general for files I want to access from my home-pc + laptop + maybe smartphone is SWITCHdrive, which doesn't have a dedicated Linux client. Because of this I have to use ownCloud, the basic program on which at least also the Windows client is based on. So it's just that I can do other work next to DigiZeit on the Linux boot.

Using Git wouldn't work well as it contains Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, etc.

for the record, you can store pdf and word docs and so on with git, they just 'don't diff well', meaning when you compare changes between them, you can't really understand what was changed. also there's a good chance that every time you change the file and recommit, the whole new file will be added, rather than just the changes. so if fixed a single typo in a 2mb pdf inside a 10mb repo, and then you push the changes, the repo may now be 12mb. if you did the same thing with text, the repo would probably just be 10.001mb or do. And even if you delete the PDF file, it remains in the history, and therefore in the total repo size. so yeah, just be careful when working with binaries or files that don't diff well.

mentioned in issue #32

@daniel.mcdonald, @manuel.kissoczy and I posted a question on Teams. We just finished a one hour trouble shooting session with Leyla but we are still encountering some issues. Do you have time for a call in the next days?

@maryam.joseph Thanks. A quick one: can we keep all questions (as long as they're not confidential) here on GitLab? Teams should just be for classes, basically; if we then have a record of all technical questions here, this will help us identify what we might need to do in the future in terms of teaching this course (your feedback in today's class was invaluable).

@daniel.mcdonald, here are the problems that came up during our trouble shooting session with @leyla.feiner Main problem: Push&Pull doesn't work. Leyla even created a test-repository and added @manuel.kissoczy and me as maintainer (i think) and even then it didn't work. I'm attaching the screenshot. In the process we identified more side-problems:

The operating system on my 2012 macbook is MacOS Sierra 10.12.6
I didn't have Brew and Git installed on my Computer (now I do)
I didn't have an Access Token (whatever that means)
I've got DS-File problems

This is fixed now? I believe it was just an issue of needing to pull first (and .gitignore those ugly DS_Stores! :)

mentioned in issue #39 (closed)

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