Is downloading GitHub locally strictly necessary?

[Nioca]

Okay, probably a dumb newbie question here, but here goes. Is it strictly necessary to download GitHub to your computer to work on the code?

I ask, for two reasons. First, I’m on dial-up, and not even particularly fast dial-up at that, so trying to sync a local repository with the online one… yeah, I’m picturing a digital cataclysm of sorts already.

Second, apparently the GitHub software no longer supports Windows XP. (No, Github.com, I will not “upgrade” to Windows 7. I’m quite happy with my OS as-is.)

Slightly different note, what compiler do you guys recommend for locally compiling for testing? (Is that even necessary? It seems like it’d be necessary.)

Thanks in advance!

[KA101]

Question’s hardly dumb and I appreciate your asking for support in advance. Thanks.

Folks have worked around it–AllisonW gets OK results for JSON work via hacking her local JSONs, testing, then copying the changes to her web repo, proofreading there, and PRing–but yeah, a local repo greatly facilitates testing.

Understood re lousy net connection though.

The XP problem is the Windows GUI, not the bash console–I hope, since I use XP too! Means you’ll have a tougher learning curve, but we’re here to help.

I’m fond of the Code::Blocks IDE and MinGW32/GCC/wev built into it, but that’s me. MinGW-w64 is more robust and we should probably migrate there at some point, but for now C::B is workable. Other devs use Cygwin, clang, and even MSVC++. On windows, we strongly recommend Notepad++ for the actual code-handling. (Settings->Preferences->Language & Tabs-> set to 2 or 4 and replaced by spaces, please–tab characters are hell on formatting.)

And welcome to the forums.

[kevin.granade]

Generally, git is going to be your most efficient option for keeping your code in sync with the main project. Linus Torvalds famously does project management on the linux kernel from airports on cellular modems on a regular basis.

The alternative is downloading the whole project again every time you need to update it, and while it might be slightly more efficient bit-wise to do that once or twice, if you keep your local repo updated on a regular basis (which you really need to), it’s going to be far faster to use a git client.

As for the client to use, as far as I know the github windows client is terrible anyway, I hear the Tortise git client is better, but I don’t know what the best option on windows is.

I can’t add anything to what KA101 said about building on windows.

[OzoneH3]

I really like SmartGit.
Works for XP, free for private use, nice gui and confict solver.

[Nioca]

Okay, thanks! I’ll try out SmartGit and download Code::Blocks IDE. Hopefully it goes well and I’ll be able to start contributing!

[Nioca]

Hi. Me again. I created a Fork and have been trying to clone it locally with less than stellar results. How big is the repository, exactly? My latest attempt downloaded 60 megabytes of data and was reading 22% completion before I lost my connection, suggesting a total size of 272 megabytes. Seeing as pause-and-resume doesn’t seem to be an option for cloning a repository, I’d have to get it all in one shot, and with only one phone line, 100-120 megabytes is about the most I can actually manage in that regard.

[Trinsic]

Checking the size of the repository after I cloned it shows about 440MBs.
Git doesn’t allow pause/resume, but there are plenty of tools to do pause/resume with regular http downloads. You can try grabbing the repository that way through https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/archive/master.zip

Once you’ve got it downloaded and unzipped, you can link it to have the github git as master and it should work the same as a regular git clone.

[Nioca]

I tried the .zip idea, but it unfortunately doesn’t seem to work. It only grabs a snapshot of the master branch, rather than the entire repository, and I couldn’t get the local repository to actually recognize the files without doing a Commit, something which I suspect would cause MASSIVE conflicts down the road. I poked around online, but I couldn’t find any methods I could use to get the repository and have it function on this computer. To make a long story short, it seems there’s no way for me to actually clone the Cataclysm repository. So it looks like I’m not going to be contributing to the code after all.

(I could probably tinker with the JSON files, but that’d about be the limit of it.)

Thanks for all your help, though!

[Pandromidal]

You could setup a free remote vm to do your develpment on. It’s a bit of a convoluted way to do things I admit but then you aren’t constricted by your dial up speed when downloading/uploading on the vm.

[i2amroy]

Maybe check out a nearby public library or somewhere else with free internet and download the repository there onto a USB or something similar? Once the repository is downloaded you don’t really need to do any huge future downloads, and you could just copy it over from the USB onto your computer and then add it as a repository through the computer application.

[KA101]

Maybe check out a nearby public library or somewhere else with free internet and download the repository there onto a USB or something similar? Once the repository is downloaded you don’t really need to do any huge future downloads, and you could just copy it over from the USB onto your computer and then add it as a repository through the computer application.

If you’re talking the zip downloads, hoping you’ve better luck than I did. I tried that back when I was setting up mine and had zero luck getting the GUI to cooperate. >_<

[i2amroy]

If you’re talking the zip downloads, hoping you’ve better luck than I did. I tried that back when I was setting up mine and had zero luck getting the GUI to cooperate. >_<

If that’s the case then sorry if my advice turns out to be useless. I am sadly a poor sufferer of the “computer dev computer syndrome”, which makes it difficult for me to tell what things work or don’t for those without is.