In the PlayScript work that I am doing on the Mono mcs compiler, keeping the PlayScript compiler in-sync with Mono’s mcs can be a pain due to the large number of changes that occur on that repo.

While I have different ‘tricks’ to try to help merging, the first thing is you have to keep one branch of your fork in-sync with the original repo that your forked, mono/mono.git in my case.

I created two local clones of my GitHub forked repo and added an ‘upstream’ remote to the original mono repo.

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git remote -v
origin    https://github.com/sushihangover/PlayScript.git (fetch)
origin    https://github.com/sushihangover/PlayScript.git (push)
upstream  https://github.com/mono/mono.git (fetch)
upstream  https://github.com/mono/mono.git (push)

One local clone is named PlayScript-master and the other is PlayScript.

The PlayScript-master is used to keep in-sync with the upstream repo, build the bleed-edge mono framework and compiler and run the mono unit-tests. This is so I always know what the current mono master looks like and how the unit tests are running so I can review the changes I am making in the local PlayScript repo and make sure that I am not injecting regression failures in the C# side of the compiler. (I’ll blog about that later). While the PlayScript-master repo will always Fast-forward on a “git merge upstream/master”, the PlayScript repo will not, I only merge one branch/tag mono release at a time to master branch and then merge/rebase playscript branch in order to maintain my sanity (some of the internal API changes on even Mono minor releases can drive a person to drink).

So to quickly update my master mono as it will always fast-forward, I have a script in the root repo called mono-master-update-install.sh.

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cd ../PlayScript-master
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master
git push origin
make
make install

Note: You can add the mono unit tests to the end of that script if you wish.

Note:: I have the PlayScript-master master branch installing into a prefix of ~/mono-install and the PlayScript playscript branch installing into the ~/playscript-install. That way I can always switch quickly between the installed ‘released’ Mono framework, the pure bleeding-edge mono build and the PlayScript build with a simple path change.