Introducing Landle

So a while back I wrote about how it feels, sometimes, to have so much on the go that there's no possible way to do it all. One of the things I mentioned was an idea for a program to mirror your Github repos: all the things you've ever starred, or forked, or watched, or whatever. That was a serious project (though not necessarily a serious goal), and in the grand tradition of missing the point entirely I started writing it. It's now good enough for me to use from cron (though it's not without its bugs and missing features), so here it is: landle, a Small but Useful(tm) utility to mirror your Github repos. You can grab it from Github (natch) or my own repo (double-natch).

I imagine two use cases. First, someone wants an up-to-date copy of their Github stuff on their laptop, available for hacking when offline. Second, maintaining an up-to-date copy of their stuff in case of takeover by Oracle (the Githubpocalypse).

To be clear: this is a straight-up ripoff/rewrite of ghsync (right down to the directory layout). ghsync is elegant and wonderful, but I was unable to get its dependencies to work for me. I had the choice of persevering and learning Python better, or rewriting it in Perl and learning development a bit better. I chose the latter. (Side note: not an easy choice! I hate leaving problems unsolved, for one, and I really do want to do more with Python. But this was also a good chance to start a real, though bite-sized, project, and to try hard to do the Right Thing.)

In the grand tradition of all ambitious rewrites, I would not have called the current release "1.3", but instead "0.99pluralZalpha-rc1" or some such. But modulo the TODO list, it's pretty good as it is...a good, solid beta.