When I started with kams, it was just going to be my own little MUD server that I puttered around with. So I set up a little Subversion repository and went at it. That repository slowly turned into my main server for the game. That way, I could do version control and keep a backup copy of everything. That worked pretty well for quite a while, until the decision was made to release some code. To do so, I created a branch, stripped out all of the stuff I didn’t want publicly released, and then released that code. Well, that is the way it was supposed to work. Actually, I had to fix things along the way as I was preparing the release code. This meant copying/merging back and forth between the branch and the trunk versions of the code.

This became annoying.

Now that I have been using Git for a while, I was hoping to do something so that I can continue my current path (keeping my private stuff private, but in the Subversion repository), but also maintaining an on-going public code repository.

To compound the issue, I (very foolishly?) do most of the development work on the live server. (Keep in mind, no one is actually using the live server, so this really does not matter.)

This is what I came up with. First, I created a GitHub repository for the public code. Then I copied my latest branch into the Git repository, committed it. Next, I created a new branch, deleted all the files, and then did an svn checkout to the new branch, and finally committed the private files to that Git branch.

Now what I can do is make code updates on my trunk code (kept in Subversion), then do an svn update on the private Git branch, then do a Git commit of the specific changes I want put in the public repository, then do a git cherry-pick of that commit into my master branch. Finally, a git push puts it all up on Github.

This works in reverse, as well. Changes made in the Git repository can be propagated to the private branch, from there to the Subversion repository of the trunk.

Works fairly well, actually, and it will make it considerably easier to create future releases. Yay.