Working on a longer coursera project locally on Lubuntu

Today I decided to return to the practice of using a VCS due to the data science capstone project's growth. I have repos here and there, but somehow they just don't want to perfectly fit my needs (there's either size limit, lack of privacy or I'd have to pay).

I already believed I needed a local VCS since on longer tube journeys and flights I may not have internet access.

I supposed I'd choose git as I was hoping to deepen my experience with it, so that I can get more effective with the online hosted version as well - just about everything seems to happen on GitHub these days.

The client

I first checked out the clients - at least those available on Linux. I so far haven't come upon those feature rich UI's that I was used to on Windows, but I still demand something similar, so it was crucial (those tiny little annoyances which often go unnoticed, can really slow down work).

Formerly I didn't have much luck when choosing the weapons for Subversion, back then I couldn't find a *nix match for the handy TortoiseSVN. I have RapidSVN but the version I have is exhaustingly bogus.

As git I assumed is trendier, I had better hopes for better maintained clients. I found the default range on this page, and with my criteria in mind (free, open-source, working, preferably cross-platform) this quickly narrowed down to git-cola.

It appears good enough (although it froze a couple of times while authenticating with the server in my tests), however the aptitude version is way outdated (or at least its about dialog, pretending to be from 2012), so I had to uninstall that one (apt-get remove git-cola), and install it from source.

It is also written in python, which I'm learning as time allows, so the sources might give me a lesson or two on that.

The "server"

While some git components, especially the CLI clients should have already been present on my system, I checked the official installation steps and kicked off with a further

sudo apt-get install git-all

just to be sure ... further from that, after a little thinking and experimenting, it turns out that the client tools with a local repository are probably all I needed to get going with my local project.

... and it works!

I only had to initialize a new repo, and it was working straight ahead.
I mean, after untarring, it already works with

~/Downloads/git-cola-2.5/bin/git-cola

if someone enjoys inconvenience. I decided to call it a day - TBC.

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And as a little perk for the night, I accidentally (was queued for later in preference over some Netflix whatnot...) watched a TED talk with Linus Torvalds which surprised me with mentioning his share of creating Git as well as Linux. Nicely done!

Update

make prefix=/usr install

executed from within the git-cola directory (~/Downloads/git-cola-2.5 according to the above) does the job, so that git-cola can be now launched with ease from the terminal, and also gets available from the "Programming" menu group.

Sorry about the formatting, at this point I'm lazy.

GitHub and R

I've been to a workshop preceding a meetup where the basics of how GitHub can be conveniently used with R Studio was the topic.

One benefit: I finally got my hands a little dirty with creating GitHub issues (although to date I tried to avoid that ... partly because I only ever had public repositories and possibly I didn't want to share every everything, especially not exemplary beginner's mistakes :) ).

Another one: Being reminded of continuous integration. One day I'm sure it'll come useful. The only problem with it is it didn't fit into the workshop, but here are the related slides for that one day:

http://mangothecat.github.io/github-workshop/05-best-practices.html#continuous-integration

And, say, the third: Catching sight of the "git" tab in the R Studio GUI, once that's sufficiently enabled for the project. Again, one fine day ...