I use Eclipse to develop in java for Android. I have installed Mercurial to control the source files with other programmers.
But I don't like how mercurial works, without options to lock the files when someone are modifing it.
I know mercurial works in this way, but we prefer the lock "approach".
Is there any alternative to mercurial with lock files?
Is there any way to config Eclipse to avoid write on read-only files? If I have a read-only source file, with Eclipse I can open it and write in it.
Thanks.
Quote from Mercurial: The Definitive Guide:
For instance, a distributed revision control system cannot, by its
nature, offer a file locking facility. There is thus no built-in
mechanism to prevent two people from making conflicting changes to a
binary file. If you have a team where several people may be editing
binary files frequently, it may not be a good idea to use Mercurial—or
any other distributed revision control system—to manage those files.
However, right underneath the paragraph, there is a reference to an extension you can use, named "lock/unlock extension". A quick search located a page that describes the extension, but I didn't use it yet. The linked page also hints at the existence of another, older extension of the same name.
As a final note, personally, I agree with the quote from the book. If you need file or directory locking in your workflow, trying to use a distributed version control system is only going to create problems for you. You will probably be better off using a more traditional version control system.
Related
I had created a bulky activity and now I need to modify a lot in it. I decided to first copy paste the entire code on text box but I do not think it is the right way. I want to save the activity consisting of xml file and .java file in a single file that can be recalled if required. Is this possible or should I copy and paste both file to some location manually.
Thanks
In modern Software development it is often a good practice to use some kind of version control system.
A lot of people are using systems based on git like GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket etc.
These tools help to manage your source code in different versions and enable you to switch between versions easily.
In your case you could decide to work with github and after pushing your project you could compare your recent code with the new one until you decide your refactoring is done.
If you decide to dive into this you find many tutorials with google.
e.G https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-git
I have a number of different Android applications building in Eclipse / ADT that share common code and assets. Sharing the common source code folder is easy as I can use Link Source in the Build Path set-up. This works great.
These programs also share the content that's in the assets folder. At the moment I'm duplicating, which is a bit inelegant and error-prone.
Is it trivially possible to tell Eclipse / ADT to use a common assets folder in a similar way that it is trivial to have it share a source code folder? I can't find any similar option or tool.
Notes:
I am not looking for a 'library' solution (indeed that seems
fraught with issues anyway, and I did try that previously and hit
issues like this one). In any case that's less relevant for
assets, and I'm looking for simplicity.
It doesn't matter if the shared assets folder has to contain a
superset of the needs of all the applications.
Assets. Not "resources".
I'm using ADT version 22.2
For many complex reasons, symbolically linking the folders will not suffice. (You do not want to know the details. You'd never believe them anyway.)
Sharing the common source code folder is easy as I can use Link Source in the Build Path set-up
I would not count on that working over the long haul.
At the moment I'm duplicating, which is a bit inelegant and error-prone.
Alas, given your other restrictions, I suspect that it is your only option, though you could take some steps to reduce the error-prone aspect (e.g., script that synchronized the contents).
Long-term, Gradle for Android will be The One True Answer for all builds, Eclipse included. At that point, I expect your "Link Source" will break. However, at that time, you should be able to cut over to Gradle for your builds.
Gradle allows developers to override the default locations of all sorts of directories, including the assets directory. You should be able to set up a build.gradle file that points to some common location for the assets directory, overriding the default location that looks inside the project itself.
It's unclear why you think that symlinks/hardlinks will not work for you as a stopgap measure. You might wish to consider asking a separate StackOverflow question, explaining what you have tried and what problems you encountered with that technique, whether you think we will believe them or not.
Bear in mind that while Eclipse handles the javac step for the Android build, everything else is largely handled by external tools (e.g., aapt). Those will be oblivious to things that exist solely in Eclipse-land. Conversely, that's why symlinks/hardlinks should work, as from the standpoint of those tools, such items should be treated the same as actual files in the filesystem. Hence, the reason why "Link Source" works is not because Android really supports it, but that Android presently delegates that one piece of the build to Eclipse itself. Once Google adds Gradle for Android support for Eclipse (which I hope will be before the end of 2014), then I would expect Eclipse to be completely cut out of the build process, and I expect "Link Source" to fail at that point.
Is there a way to save projects on Google Drive when using Android Studio?
I want to access the project from two different locations, but the path to my account under "users" is different, as I use two different usernames on each of the machines.
Since Google Drive folder is under my user folder, the config is wrong if the project is opened from the other machine.
Any advise how I can use the cloud to work on my project?
Thanks!
Trying to use a networked folder to access from two different machines is problematic -- At a minimum, you'll be trying to share local.properties files between the instances, which it's specifically intended to not do. The .idea and .iml files, if you're using Gradle-based projects, aren't intended to be shared among computers. I've seen reports that these can contain absolute paths, which will make sharing them tricky. That's perhaps a bug that could be fixed, but we treat those files as local in Gradle-based projects and not intended to be checked into source control, for example.
I think that's your answer -- set up your project in source control and use that to use it from multiple places. You'll lose the ability to be able to access the project in the exact same in-progress state from multiple places and will need to commit your changes first, but that can sometimes be an advantage, too. The saving of commit history may also be a big benefit -- it's one of those things that sometimes comes in really, really handy when you get your project in a bad state and just want to hit the reset button. Granted, Android Studio has local file history (which is a great feature, but is machine-local), but source control is more resilient.
I have a small Android application that uses different sets of files (a couple of images, a small SQLite DB and a couple of XML files) depending on the specific task at hand.
I know I can include my files into the main application APK using resources or assets but I would be happy to distribute them in a separated APK.
How can I create a data-only APK file?
How can I distribute it? In particular, do I have to do anything special for a data-only package (for example for associating it to the main application package in some way)?
(I'm intentioned to give the user a link to the data package and ask him to install it. No automatic installation required.)
How can I install my files into the internal or into the external storage area of my application? Is it possible at all to install files into the internal storage area created by the main application installer? Do I have to set any particular permission for this?
My approach to this would be to create a wrapper app that's nothing but a content-provider and serves up the files per request by your main app. This would allow you to supply different data packages for the user -- you could even have your main app select between those relatively easily.
It looks like that the commonly accepted way to have the same application with different contents (or styles, or configurations) is to use an Android Library Project for the common code (that is: the whole application, the "engine", the "app framework") and a standard Android Application Project for the contents (that is: an application that actually contains just data). A little bit confusing, just because the "library" here is actually the whole "app", but this seems to be the way to go.
More in detail:
Create an Android Library Application and put into it as much code as you can (all of the non-changing stuff). Please note that this library cannot be launched and cannot be distributed alone. It must be included in a hosting application.
Create a standard Android Application. Include your library into this project. Put in /res and in /asset all of your data (files, XML, etc.).
Compile everything and distribute.
Repeat this cycle every time you need a different version. Different because of data, style, configuration or anything else. Publish the resulting app with a new name.
For what regards me, I'm not completely satisfied by this approach.
A possible alternative is preprocessing the source code with Ruby, Python, Perl, GIT, bash, Ant, Maven, Rake or any other tool that is able to read a file from here, make some change here and there, and write the file there.
The general outline is something like this:
Make a "template" application. Leave your /res and /assset empty.
Run a custom-made script. The script reads a configuration file, copy the /res and /asset files from your repository into the project /res and /asset directories, changes some Java source file and creates/changes some XML file.
Compile and distribute (with a new name, of course).
Using GIT or other SCMs, you just make a new branch for every new version and compile it. Not very elegant (because it can strongly interfere with the normal use of the SCM) but...
There are a few example of these approaches on the web. I'm not completely satisfied by them, either.
Frankly, what the Android ecosystem should offer to solve this problem is some kind of "in-app package manager". Something like the Eclipse Update Manager. This would allow us to use the same application framework to handle different scenarios.
As an alternative, a solid, officially-supported, template-based code-generation mechanism would be nice. Something in the spirit of "Software Production Line": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_production_line . Have a look at fw4spl, for example: http://code.google.com/p/fw4spl/ .
I've been trying to use SVN Kit to gain access to an SVN repository from an Android app.
Our project is supposed to check for changes to files and download them if they have changed, but still with the ability to rollback to previous versions if nessecary.
I set up a regular Java project, and had no problem using SVN Kit, I logged into the SVN server and retrived a list of the files stored there.
But when I tryed to do this from an Android project all hell broke loose. The VM run out of heap space, just trying to build it and Eclipse went down in sreaming flames mith comments like 'GC overhead limit exceeded'.
I get the impression that this is due to the diffrent type of virtural machine that Android uses, and the SVNKit jars are compiled for a diffrent type of VM.
This Guy claims to have got it working, with what looks like an older version of Android.
Now I have suggested that we use some kind of ftp server approach, uploading new versions of the files, perhaps with seperate files containing versioning information, but I have to explore this path before I write it off as a dead end, or at least suggest that to my boss!
anyu help or suggestions would be greatly appricated.
My answer may not be directly related to SVNKit but would actually try to address the original problem.
As I understand your use-case, you want to download files if they have changed and are trying to use SVN to do this with its update command. I would rather create a simple web-service which should return me the list of files with their checksums or md5Hash. Now I am assuming that only the relevant files are present on the server. Upon receiving the hashes, you can compare them with the hashes on the device and decide to update based on any difference. This approach will work for rollback too as you need to just replace the file on the server with old file and this would be treated as a new one.
As far as heap overflow and out of memory is concerned, they are mostly because of the limited heap space around 10MB.
I created a SVN client based on SVNKit it is available for free here : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.valleytg.oasvnlite.android
I am not sure if that will work for your purpose or you have to build your own. If you are looking to build your own, svnkit will not work directly on the android platform. Some of the libraries used by SVNkit are not available on the Android platform.