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Obtaining Topographica using Git

The master repository for Topographica code is stored by Subversion (SVN) at SourceForge.net. However, many other version control systems can interact with an SVN repository, so you are free to use an alternative. In particular, Git (along with other distributed version control systems) allows one to take advantage of version control without having to be a registered Topographica developer.

Although git is not typically installed in most Linux distributions, it is usually easy to add it. E.g. for Debian or Ubuntu Linux, just do 'apt-get install git git-svn git-doc'; for others you can get installation packages from git-scm.com. The git-svn package allows git to connect to Topographica's SVN repository. Note that you should try to get a Git version of at least 1.7 so that all the features described on this page are available to you. If you are building from source, you can skip git-doc, which can be difficult to compile, and is anyway available online.

Downloading

First, you need to select the SVN revision from which you would like your git history to begin (for most work, the current revision -- HEAD -- is fine). Then, execute the following: 

# Location of SVN repository
$ export TOPOROOT=https://topographica.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/topographica

# Create a new Git repository in the current directory and retrieve
# the SVN files and history
# (you can choose a value for r to get more or less history)
$ git svn clone -rHEAD $TOPOROOT/trunk/topographica .

# If you specified a value of r other than HEAD, you need to update
$ git svn rebase
If you're getting a recent revision of the topographica code, the new directory will occupy about 430 megabytes (as of October 2011).

After you have the source code, you probably want to instruct git to ignore the same files as SVN ignores: 

(echo; git svn show-ignore) >> .git/info/exclude

The checkout process will likely take several minutes (probably appearing to hang at certain points). Once it has completed, you can return to the developer installation instructions to go through the build process.

Updating

Assuming Topographica's SVN files are in your git master branch, you can update them by changing to the master branch and typing git svn rebase.

Following any update, repeat the "make" command you originally used when installing Topographica (the command depends on how you installed Topographica; return to the developer installation instructions for details).

Hosted by: SourceForge Logo James A. Bednar (jbednar@inf.ed.ac.uk) Last update: Tue Nov 1 9:50:29 UTC 2011.