Kristjan Jansen

Almost a year ago, in Oct 2010 I made a presentation about Drupal history in the first ever Drupalcamp Baltics conference. In some hazy reason I never published the slides. Just found them today, so it's time for a Drupal Time Machine again. Check out those young faces, long-lost archive screenshots and other curio from the Drupal glory days. Here are the slides:

Short History of Drupal (3.6 MB PDF)

Want more? There's also an agentrickard's talk Lessons from Drupal 3 from Drupalcon Chicago.

Here's my presentation from Drupalcamp Estonia, talking about upgrading to Drupal 7 and latest Drupal 8 developments. My slides can be found here (PDF), rest of the presentations videos can be found in Vimeo and slides in Slideshare.

Yep, the event was rocking, it was quite an upgrade from our 2009 forest brothers camp to a futuristic postindustrial Ülemiste City. Also, do not miss the photos from the event, including the obligatory group one.

Now and then in Drupal-land we encounter ideas what are already tried in the past. This includes recently introduced Git sandboxes – temporary project spaces what can contain experimental stuff: prototype code, alternative takes on modules etc.

Now lets rewind back 8 years: meet CVS sandboxes – somewhat similar concept introduced in early days of Drupal when community of core contributors started to emerge but there were no issue/patch queue as we know it. Also as there were no module/theme versioning at that time, the devs somehow needed to maintain their -dev versions of their code.

So, sandboxes were introduced, located under contributions/sandbox/username where users with CVS write access could store their stuff. It's hard to pinpoint the excact beginning date of the sandboxes, my personal quess would be late 2002 – early 2003 but please correct me here.

But enough of old stories, lets get to the fun part: diggin' some 'boxes. Although both repository viewers, cvs.drupal.org and drupalcode.org are now defunct, CVS sandboxes are still accessible via running

 cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d sandbox contributions/sandbox 

Warning: this gets you all sandboxes, 130MB in total by 292 users.

Here are some findings from my own stash, such as a very rare mockup for Drop.org, (precursor of Drupal Planet) from March 2003:

README states:

This directory consists concept sketches and neccessary image files to to make bluemarine.theme suitable for www.drop.org portal.Unfortunately I do not have time to implement these changes myself, I hope someone will take a lead.

Also there's a usability analysis, redesign proposal and IA for Drupal admin section from Nov 2003 what almost sounds like a D4UX project of the era:

First of all we must ask ourserves – why should we the vistit admin page at first place? What are the tasks we do often? What are the admin sections we rarely vistit? /…/ Current Drupal admin page is a victm of its own über-modularity. All admin links are treated as equal, but in reality they are not. /…/

Note that this is only the beginning, it was the checkout in the latest known state. Checking out stuff using different CVS timestamps or branches could earth more hidden gems.

So what's in your sandbox? Just type the following, replacing username with your CVS username

 cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d sandbox-username contributions/sandbox/username 

and launch your Sandbox Time Machine before @drupalgitgremln pushes it to the void!

Here's the super-simple Git branch indicator: it leaves the default OSX Snow Leopard command prompt formatting intact, just appends (branchname) to a prompt if you happen to be in Git directory.

Add this sippet to your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile:

function parse_git_branch {
  git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}
export PS1="\h:\W \u\$(parse_git_branch)\$ "

Thanks to Jerad for inspiration over Lullabot!

There are several SVN users out there who use one single monolithic repo for multiple projects. Let's assume you are maintaing Drupal module [yourmodule] in Google Code SVN repo under trunk/path/to/[yourmodule]. How to migrate only that particular subdirectory to Drupal Git?

There are many ways to solve it, I am going through options A (simpler, slower) and B (complex, faster).

Option A: Git Way

This option is more Git-centric and simpler but could be a slower if you have a massive SVN repo since we are cloning the whole shebang first.

Step A1: Convert a full Google Code SVN repo to local Git repo

git svn clone -s http://[your_google_code_repo].googlecode.com/svn [yourmodule]

Optionally you may want to convert the commiter's usernames to Drupal usernames. To do that, create a file authors.txt and fill it with following

[google_code_username] = [drupal_org_username]<[drupal_org_email]>
...

In my personal case some strange commits had no author, so I had to add following line as well

(no author) = [drupal_org_username] <[drupal_org_email]>

so the command above looks like this instead

git svn clone --authors-file=path/to/authors.txt -s http://[your_google_code_repo].googlecode.com/svn [yourmodule]

Step A2: Get rid of everything inside local Git repo except your module

cd [yourmodule]

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter 
[path/to/yourmodule] HEAD

git reset --hard

git gc --aggressive

git prune

Optionally you may want to get rid of git-svn-id's what git svn clone has added to each commit message: "git-svn-id: file:///local/path/to/[mymodule]_svn/trunk@[rev] [hash]"

To get rid of this, follow these instructions. To summarize: git clone this https://github.com/nothingmuch/git-svn-abandon, make sure the directory is accessible from $PATH and inside your git repo run

git svn-abandon-cleanup

Surprisingly I had to run this command twice to get the desired effect.

Step A3: Push local Git repo to Drupal.org

Make sure you have set up git access, keys and new project [yourmodule] first (for testing create a sandbox project).

git remote add origin 
[drupal_git_username]@git.drupal.org:project/[mymodule].git

git push origin master

Ta-da, you successfully moved a subdir from Google Code SVN to Drupal Git!

Option B: SVN Way

This might be a little quicker option if you have a gigantic Google Code SVN repo but it's a bit messier to get going.

Step B1: Create local SVN repo

svnadmin create [yourmodule]_svn

(the "_svn" suffix is arbitrary, it's there to separate directory name from future git repo directory)

then run your favourite text editor

mate [yourmodule]_svn/hooks/code-revprop-change

fill it with following contents and save:

#!/bin/bash
exit 0

Then run

chmod +x [yourmodule]_svn/hooks/code-revprop-change

Step B2: Sync a subdirectory from Google Code SVN to local SVN repo

svnsync init --username [google_code_username] file:///[local/path/to/][yourmodule]_svn https://[your_google_code_repo].googlecode.com/svn/[path/to/][yourmodule]

and then (this might take a while)

svnsync sync --username [google_code_username] file:///[local/path/to/][yourmodule]_svn

Step B3: Convert local SVN repo to local Git repo

git svn clone -s file:///[local/path/to/][yourmodule]_svn [yourmodule]

As in Step A1 you may want to use authors.txt in this command and as in Step A2 use "git svn-abandon-cleanup" afterwards.

Step B4: Push local Git repo to Drupal.org

You will know the drill:

cd [yourmodule]
git remote add origin [drupal_git_username]@git.drupal.org:project/[mymodule].git

git push origin master

Note that my personal case was simple: I had no branches nor tags in my Google code repo so I have not tested those more complicated cases. Looking forward for feedback how to do the migration per branch/tag.

References:

http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/SubversionFAQ# How_do_I_download_my_Subversion_history?

http://help.github.com/svn-importing/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/433276/svn-repository-split-problem/466039#466039

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/359424/detach-subdirectory-into-separate-git-repository

My recent oddball piece of Drupal memorabilia, History of Drupal logos got some tremendeous feedback – thanks, guys! – it seems it struck the nostalgia nerve of the community.

Lets continue the quest to dig our CVS treasures and relive those memories. So I proposed a short fun session in Drupalcon Chicago, aligned to the “10 years of Drupal” theme of the conference:

History of Druplicon (Track: Drupal Community, Experience: Beginner)

If it gets selected to Drupalcon (yes, it depends how you vote ;), I'd like to run some interviews with the vets of the community to get more insight into those crazy early days and get the session more personal. You know who you are!

UPDATE: My session was not the lucky one, I'm a no-go Drupalcon Chicago this year.

test

I was recently asked to bring back memories of early Drupal history, especially the birth of the Drupal logo. For research I found a goldmine: Drupal CVS commit history http://drupalcode.org (renamed from cvs.drupal.org). Combining that with CHANGELOG.txt and my hazy memory here's the short unofficial story of Drupal logo – in full color.

Note that I included some personal notes but I do not want to over-emphasize my role: biggest credit for creating early Drupal visual image goes to Steven Wittens aka Unconed and there are tons of others not mentioned. Thanks for you all!

Also, if you have any corrections to this history – or some funny details to add, let me know via e-mail, Twitter or the comment form below.

It's time to get back to Brazilian music vaults, straight from São Paulo Cidade Universitária. This time explore some rare fusion grooves, jazz, soul and funk. We do not landlock ourselves to Brazil only, we also check out what brazilians recorded while living in outside home: France and Italy. And vice versa, let's hear some heavily Brazil-influenced tunes as far as Japan and Peru.

Though the show is in Estonian, but I try to talk as little as possible so you can enjoy the music ;)

Kristjan Janseni Brasiilia muusikasaade 8 (46 MB MP3)

Here's the tracklist:

1. Antonio Adolfo “Caminhada” – Viralata, 1979
2. Elis Regina “Mundo Deserto” – Ela, 1971
3. Cassiano “O Vale” – Apresentamos Nosso Cassiano,1973
4. Dom Salvador E Abolição “Evo” – Som, Sangue E Raça, 1971
5. Rolando & Luiz Antonio “Nacional Kid (Ou Brasileiro)” – Meu Coração É Um Pandeiro Ou…, 1976
6. Ezy & Isaac “Take off!” – Soul Rock, 1974
7. Matsuoka & Wesing “Pão de Açúcar” – Fiesta Fiesta, 1979
8. Bossa 70 “Birimbao” – Bossa 70, 1970
9. Quarteto Novo “Misturada” – Quarteto Novo, 1970
10. Grupo Pentagrama “Pingo De Cor” – Grupo Pentagrama, 1976
11. João Donato “A Rã” – A Bad Donato, 1970
12. Marcos Valle & Azymuth “Jingle Cruzeiro” – Brazil By Music: Fly Cruzeiro, 1972
13. Marcos Valle “O Cafonia” – Garra, 1970
14. João Donato “Lunar Tune” – A Bad Donato, 1970
15. Jardes “Grilos da Vida” – ?, ?

And here's the highly recommended Brazilian music mixtape Discos Originais by San Antonio I mention in the show.

I am breathless: considering Estonian astonishingly slow Drupal pickup rate, a first big-name site has launched: Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Was it the Drupalgate affair making diplomats finally move faster?

Edit: the conversion was made in-house, with Canadian company Liefa Communications doing design as Photoshop comps.