I hate having to enter my ssh key passphrase just to fetch from public Git repositories where I have push access. Fortunately, since version 1.6.4 Git has had the ability to separately specify the URLs to use when fetching, and when pushing. In addition to no longer requiring me to have my SSH key loaded when I go to fetch, I’ve noticed that fetching is now faster without the overhead of SSH.

In order to configure different fetch, and push URLs, you’ll need to add a pushURL setting in the .git/config for the remotes you want configured. With the url setting configured to use a git:// style URL, and the pushURL setup to use an SSH URL (git@ or ssh://), you can avoid the overhead of SSH when fetching, but still be able to push to the repository.

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[remote "origin"]
    url = git://github.com/jhelwig/technosorcery.net.git
    pushURL = git@github.com:jhelwig/technosorcery.net.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

This particularly comes in handy on machines where I have GPG Agent setup to be my SSH Agent (since I have GPG Agent setup with a timeout which requires unlocking the keys again), and also with projects where I have multiple remotes where I can push.

There are a number of features Git has had for some time that go largely unnoticed by most people. Being able to refer to branches using the @{-1} notation (and its - alias) is one of the features I use on a regular basis that most people seem unaware of, even though they’ve been around since version 1.6.2.

One useful feature Git has had since 1.7.0 is the ability to refer to the branch that another one is tracking using [branch]@{upstream} notation. I’ve found this especially handy while working on projects with multiple committers.

Without any additional command line options git push’s behavior is almost never what I actually want it to do, since I rarely wish to push more than one branch at once, and often work with multiple remotes where I have push access.

Even though I am generally in the habit of always supplying both the remote and a list of refs when pushing (git push <remote> <ref1> [..<refN>]) I’d rather not have anything potentially dangerous or unwanted happen if I happen to leave off the ref(s) (or very rarely both the remote and the ref(s)).

Git has some output that can be very helpful to people getting started with it. Once you’ve been using Git for a while, however, you may find that the advice that Git provides to help deal with certain situations just ends up taking up screen real estate. Fortunately, there is a way to turn off a number of these messages.

There is a simple tweak to make working with Git a lot nicer that people often don’t know about, or forget to do is turn on Git’s ability to colorize its output.

A while back, I ditched Mephisto in favor of a static site generator I’d written in Perl (WWW::StaticBlog). When setting up a new laptop, and preparing to write a new post, I discovered that one of its dependencies (Text::Multi) is no longer on CPAN. In my haste to set something up I ended up deploying a new version of the site using nanoc, before fully working out the kinks. Turns out that nanoc doesn’t really support having pygments output line numbers in the “table” format, and working on fixing this was more work than I was willing to put in when there are many alternatives out there.

I’ve been giving emacs a try after having probably the most civilized “emacs vs. vim” discussion I’ve ever seen or been a part of. The discussion took place just over two weeks ago at the PDX Hackathon with Brian Rice (emacs) and Ben Hengst (vim).

One of my co-workers recently asked me to send him my setup for being able to read & write email while fully disconnected from the internet using mutt.

As part of automating the packaging process for Puppet Dashboard we ran into some baffling issues regarding the package signatures. Initially, we ended up with a package that was recognized as having a valid signature on some systems, but not others (Good with RPM 4.7.2, bad with 4.4.2.3). Additionally, when we tried signing the package with our “normal” GPG keys to try and debug this, we were unable to get a good signature from any of the systems we were testing with.

After much cursing, and Googling, we were able to find the correct incantation to get past the gauntlet of bizarre RPM behavior.