Tool to handle versioning a Renoise song in a local git repo.
Currently at the "works for me, mostly" stage.
The tool is a wrapper around 7z and git.
There is a very real possibility you will lose work.
Update: 4 July 2015 - Fixed a nasty bug in how xrns were regenerated.
A Renoise song is a zip file that contains an XML file of song details, and whatever samples are used in the song. Maybe there's some other stuff as well, but it's a combination of binary data (the wavs or flacs or what have you) and text.
If you use git directly with this zip file you end up with (essentially) a complete copy of the song on every commit; that's just a problem of using binary files in certain change-control programs.
This ends up eating a good deal of disk space. You also cannot do useful things like cherry-pick changes or diff stuff to see just what was changed.
In practice many songs changes do not change the binary data as often as the text data. If you are not changing the song samples then your changes are probably happening in Song.xml. Those are the changes that need fine-grain tracking.
The way to do this is to unzip the xrns file and place the individual files under git control.
The problem is that you would have to manually unzip the song each time you wanted to commit changes. If you wanted to roll back to an earlier song version, or change to a different branch, you would need to re-zip those files back into an xrns file.
The overall goal of rnsgit is to manage these actions. The code is in the exploratory stage. Be warned.
The code should:
- Create a repo if none exists
- Automatically update the
xrnsfile when changing branches - Automatically unzip and commit changes when (instructed)
- Try not to destroy anything
This is one of many things in flux. The current approach assumes you have a folder with a bunch of Renoise songs. To "giterize" a song you would call the rnsgit script and pass in some command, maybe some options, and the song name.
For example:
rnsgit init my-colossol-song.xrns # Create a repo folder
rnsgit ci "Now goes to 11" my-colossol-song.xrns # Unzip the xrns into the repo and commit the changes
rnsgit br super-amazing-radio-version my-colossol-song.xrns # Switch branch and update the current xrns file
An immediate need is to know that these things behave as expected and are not borking any song files.
The current code uses shell commands. It's being developed on Ubuntu but needs to work on Windows as well. (It should Just Work on OSX if it works on linux). Since it is proxying calls to a local git setup it should be possible to have it respect whatever git abbreviations you have set up (e.g. br for branch, ci for commit).
There's a matter of designing for convenience, too.
Always passing in a song name can be tedious. So there's a special command (zip or pin) that will create or update a local file named .rnsgit. So far all it does is store a song file name. But with that file in place you can then omit the song file name when calling the script.
The idea of having a default song is appealing because it makes usage a bit easier (and more like using git directly).
If the script were to behave just like git, with auto-zip/unzip in there as super colossal bonus behavior, this might make usage more intuitive to people used to git.
The script then would proxy all commands with some xrns-handling wrapping.
But that's not what happens right now. Maybe tomorrow.
- Need to add better help so you know what works
- Need to change code so that all actual git commands work as expected (plus the magic xrns zip/unzip stuff)
- Renoise will not detect song file changes if, for example, you switch branches or revert some changes; pretty sure you will have to reload the song yourself
- Seems to work
- If it does work then it provides versioning of your Renoise song while eliminating some of the zip/unzip drudgery
You must have git installed.
You must have 7z installed.
You must have a zen-like acceptance of alpha code.
Grab the code from the repo, run rake gem and install the results.
You'll need the bones gem for this. Probably other stuff as well.
james Britt / Neurogami
The MIT License
Copyright (c) 2015 James Britt / Neurogami
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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