Last week I took part to an intensive Clojure-course which was an introduction to functional programming using Clojure. The course itself was fairly well organized and interesting but that’s not the topic of this post.
The course was built around solving small programming tasks using clojure. Each topic had their own separate git repository on github which we cloned and added our solutions in. The end result was that participants had many repositories (one for each exercise set) and this was fine during the course. Now that I’ve successfully passed the course I wanted to get rid of all the separate repositories and combine them to a single git repository. I could have simply created a new repository and copied the files into it but this way I would have lost all commit history. I have previously used git submodules but since I won’t be developing these assignments further I would rather not user that method. Few minutes of googling and I found a solution for my problem, git subtree merge. Subtree merge is perfect for my use case since I my repositories were separate but they shared no data with each other. In other words there would not be any merge conflicts.
Here is a quick tutorial of the steps that I did.
First I created a new folder called Clojure and two subdirectories called exercises and material.
$ tree Clojure/
Clojure/
├── exercises
└── material
Then I initialized an empty git repository to the Clojure directory.
$ cd Clojure/ && git init
Next I created a subdirectory which I will use as a prefix to a following merge.
mkdir exercises/old_project
Now it was just a matter of adding the old repository as a remote repository to our newly created main repository.
git remote add -f old_project http://www.example.com/repo/old_project.git
Then do the merge without doing the actual commit.
git merge -s ours --no-commit old_project/master
Next we actually add the old_project repository to our new repository. This happens with git read-tree command which reads the master tree of the old_project repository and stores it under the path given with prefi argument.
git read-tree --prefix=exercises/old_project -u old_project/master
Now we are almost done. Final step is to actually do the commit.
git commit -m "Merged old_project repository to Clojure repository"
In my case I had multiple repositories so I just repeated those steps for every repository I wanted to combine. My final repository structure looks like the one below.
$ tree -d Clojure/
Clojure/
├── exercises
│ ├── blorg
│ │ ├── src
│ │ │ └── blorg
│ │ └── test
│ │ └── blorg
│ ├── i-am-a-horse-in-the-land-of-booleans
│ │ ├── src
│ │ └── test
│ ├── looping-is-recursion
│ │ ├── src
│ │ └── test
│ ├── one-function-to-rule-them-all
│ │ ├── doc
│ │ ├── src
│ │ └── test
│ ├── p-p-p-pokerface
│ │ ├── src
│ │ └── test
│ ├── predicates
│ │ ├── src
│ │ └── test
│ ├── recursion
│ │ ├── src
│ │ └── test
│ ├── structured-data
│ │ ├── src
│ │ └── test
│ ├── sudoku
│ │ ├── src
│ │ │ └── sudoku
│ │ └── test
│ │ └── sudoku
│ └── training-day
│ ├── src
│ ├── target
│ │ ├── classes
│ │ └── stale
│ └── test
└── material
└── 120-hour-epic-sax-marathon
├── bin
├── css
└── img
The first level subdirectories below exercise and material directories were originally separate git repositories. Now I have one single repository that contains the data of all the old repositories which I can easily push to github.