Git ahead

Almost since I started using git I found myself following the tip 'don't git pull, use git fetch and git merge'. I have found this tip useful specially to prevent unexpected disruptive changes to come to my local branch.

I used to fetch changes and take a look at incoming commits with the command:

git log <current branch>..origin/<current branch>

In my work environment, our git repo has grown quite a bit and the names of the branches have started to get longer and longer. Besides, I thought there should be a way to not have to tell git the name of the current branch, since it already knows its name. So I included this alias in my git configuration.

git config --global alias.ahead '!git log HEAD..$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref --symbolic-full-name @{u})'

So now I can simply write git ahead after fetching from remote to get the log of incoming commits for the current branch I'm working on.

xmllint and xsltproc

I've been recently developing XSL transformations. I've been implementing C++ code to edit XML files using XPath values too.

I had previously used xsltproc, the command line utility distributed together with libxslt to test and debug my XSL transformations.

I have also used xmllint to validate hand-written XML files in order to be both well-formed and valid against a given DTD or XSchema.

But I recently discovered a wonderful xmllint feature: the --shell option. It runs an interactive shell that allows the user to navigate within the XML document as in a file system. But navigating is not the most useful feature I found for the shell option: it's the xpath command.

It allows to quickly check what node-set will be obtained when applying an XPath expression to a given XML input file.

It's a really useful utility when writing complex XPath expressions or checking out results for XPath expressions on complex documents.