Integrating Mylyn into your Git workflow
, February 16th, 2011In January, most of the EGit committers met at the “EGit Summit” in Walldorf, Germany. We had a blast hanging out together, planning the future direction for EGit/JGit, and implementing new features.
Thanks again to the SAP team for hosting the event.
As you can see on the whiteboard, there were numerous ideas suggested by the EGit committers who attended. We organized and prioritized the topics and then broke up into small teams. One user story that was commonly asked for was improved integration between EGit and Mylyn – Chris Aniszczyk (Red Hat), Manuel Doninger (Markant) and I (Tasktop) decided to form a team to make this improved integration real.
“EGit Mylyn (Incubation)”, a new feature that came from our activities at the Summit, allows you to have a tighter integration between Mylyn and EGit. This feature is available from the current update site.
We were fortunate to have a starting point from Manuel and others, and as result, by the end of the first day of the Summit, initial support for pre-populating the commit message from the active task was completed. This means that if you’re activly working on a task, once you fire up the commit dialog, it is prefilled with the commit message for the activated task. See the screenshots below.
The industry analysts like Forrester and Gartner have been emphasizing the importance of visibility and traceability in today’s modern development efforts. One great feature we were able to implement for achieving better traceability is support for linking between commits and tasks. With this feature, once a you fire up the History view of your git project, you’re able to open up the task corresponding to the commit with a single click. We implemented the same feature for the Git Synchronize view as well.
In the future, we want to work on an even tighter integration between EGit and Mylyn. One idea is per-task branching. This essentially means that if you activate a task, EGit automatically creates a “feature branch” for your task and later it will merge it back into the master branch for pushing upstream. Manuel already has a working prototype which will hopefully find its way into the EGit master soon. If you’re interested in this idea, take look at this task.
Besides the Mylyn integration, many other new features and fixes found their way into the 0.11 stream of EGit. You may want to check out the New & Noteworthy.
If you have your own ideas for how EGit and Mylyn can work together more seamlessly, please comment on this post or open a new feature request in the EGit Bugzilla component. We always are excited to get new committers as well as new contributors to EGit who can help us make it an even better project.
About Benjamin Muskalla
Benjamin Muskalla is a software developer at Tasktop Technologies in Karlsruhe, Germany. He is an active committer on Mylyn (Versions, Builds) and EGit, the Git integration for Eclipse. Ben also contributes to several other Eclipse projects including RAP, Platform UI and JDT. Ben has been deeply involved in the Eclipse community for more than six years and is a regular speaker and author on Eclipse-related topics. Ben is passionate about the quality of the Eclipse community and the transformational productivity gains that Eclipse and Mylyn enable.
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February 16th, 2011 at 7:06 pm
[...] direction for EGit/JGit, and implementing new features. Thanks again to the SAP team for hosting… [full post] Benjamin Muskalla Tasktop Blog eclipsemylynopen source 0 0 0 [...]
February 17th, 2011 at 12:01 am
In principle the idea is good, but Mylyn needs to generate git-style messages for it to be useful.
http://365git.tumblr.com/post/3308646748/writing-git-commit-messages
The first line needs to be short (50 chars), followed by a blank line, followed by paragraphs flowed to 72 characters.
The bug state should not be part of the commit, and if there is a bug number, it should be added at the bottom as
Bug: 12345
February 17th, 2011 at 6:41 am
Mylyn integration is all very nice, but really the EGit committers should focus on fixing the ever-increasing amount of bugs and missing core features. If EGit 1.0 is going to be released in June it will arrive half-baked.
February 17th, 2011 at 2:20 pm
mmmm. you could have mentioned that you were sitting in the office nearby. i would have said “hello”
February 19th, 2011 at 5:03 am
@Alex: You can edit the Commit message template in Window -> Preferences -> Tasks -> Team. The following template could provide a more or less git-style message:
${task.description}
Bug: ${task.key}
Then the title of the Mylyn task would be in the first line, after that you can provide your explanations of the commit and the bug id would be in the last line.
February 20th, 2011 at 9:35 am
@Alex Good point! As Manuel noted, it is possible to do it by hand for now. I think, in addition, we should do this step automatically, e.g. once a project is cloned/shared with EGit and there is no default, we should adapt the template accordingly. Will raise this in Bugzilla and CC you guys.
@Neville That’s right. We are in fact focusing on getting EGit more stable and get the most out of it. Currenlty we are concentrating on getting the core features done (on the JGit layer), better performance (eg. Synchronize view got a huge performance boost) and better usability (eg. less complex Fetch/Push dialogs). The Mylyn integration on the other side is one of the most requested features from the community and also helps the committers itself to coordinate their efforts and have an improved traceability.
@Martin Sorry, totally forgot that you’re in the building. Will call you next time I’m visiting SAP
September 21st, 2011 at 9:27 am
I recently stumbled upon this EGit fork that seems to be doing the same thing mentioned in this post:
http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/mv/tree/201937/
Are these changes making their way back into the official EGit?
September 21st, 2011 at 11:33 am
James, very good question! Indeed all the changes mentioned above are already part of the official EGit Release (1.0 and 1.1). I don’t know why Intland decided to fork EGit for these matters. EGit is a very open contributor policy and receives contributions from non-commiters on a daily basis which are integrated into EGits master. I currently don’t see a reason to fork EGit to get new features in.
September 22nd, 2011 at 12:27 pm
Thanks Benjamin!
I’ve got one last question:
How can I add the current git branch to the default commit message template?
(I’m accessing this through Window -> Preferences -> Mylyn -> Team.)
September 30th, 2011 at 7:59 am
> How can I add the current git branch to the default commit message template?
Good question James. So far, there is no built-in template for the active branch. Thinking about it, this is something we might consider but need to take into account different obstacles (eg. multiple repositories). How about you open a new Feature Request at bugs.eclipse.org describing your scenario? Please add to me the CC list and I’ll have a look at it.
October 19th, 2012 at 5:19 am
Hi! Is there an overview of all supported placeholders (like ${task.key})?
October 22nd, 2012 at 12:43 am
Fabian,
when you go to your preferences, Mylyn > Team, you can use the content assist (Ctrl+Space) to see a list of all available templates.
March 8th, 2013 at 7:51 am
Has there been any progress on per-task branching? This is how I do my branching anyway, so having Mylyn do it for me would be a boon. Would be interested in contributing if it’s still in-progress.