blog: add personal experience report on updating workspaces (#212)

Author: skaldarnar

blog/2023-04-22-waking-up-from-hibernation/cover.jpg

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+---
+posttype: "blog"
+title: "Waking up from Hibernation"
+cover: "./cover.jpg"
+description: "Join me in this personal experience report on how I dust off and update my Terasology workspaces."
+tags: ["IMHO", "Comment"]
+author: "Skaldarnar"
+date: "2023-04-22"
+---
+
+_This is a personal experience report, sharing thoughts and insights into my workflow._
+
+It has been some time since our last update, and it also has been some time since my last contribution to Terasology.
+We had these quiet periods before, where everyone is charging up their batteries, learning new things, or just taking a break. 
+
+Coming back after such a long time can be hard - even if it seems quiet on a first glance, a lot of things might still have happened.
+And indeed: There have been hundreds of commits spread over our repositories since the [last blog post](/blog/tera-spotlight-gsoc-2021-final-show-tell/) in September 2021. 
+We had two releases since then, with [v5.3.0 / Alpha 23](https://github.com/MovingBlocks/Terasology/releases/tag/v5.3.0) being the latest one.
+
+Let me share how I updated my various workspaces when coming back after some time of absence...
+
+## Updating my Workspaces
+
+To start fresh I wanted to reset my workspaces to a clean state - discard any uncommitted changes (at this point I don't have any clue what they might have been about anyways) and pull the latest changes from upstream.
+It's not a hard task and I've done it uncountable times before, but not everybody might be that familiar with the tools and little helpers available to assist with that task.
+
+### Updating my Iota Workspace
+
+To bring my Iota workspace up to speed I used the `groovyw` utility tool that is shipped with the engine repository.
+You can run it easily via the provided wrapper scripts, that is `./groovyw` on Linux or `./groovyw.bat` on Windows.
+It comes in handy to initialize a workspace with a specific set of modules, fetch additional modules, or update everything via git.
+Our [Contributor Quick Start Guide](https://github.com/MovingBlocks/Terasology/wiki/Contributor-Quick-Start#set-up-your-terasology-development-workspace) also references it for the initial setup.
+
+But today I'm only interested in updating all my modules in the workspace.
+
+```
+groovyw module update-all
+```
+
+This command triggers a run over all the modules in `modules/` and attempts to update them. 
+
+![](./groovyw-update-all-iota.png)
+
+This took about 5 seconds to go over the 11 modules of our Iota distribution.
+Seemingly my modules were all on `develop` and up to date, so there was nothing else to do here.
+
+Note, that this only updates the modules. 
+I had to update the engine itself manually by checking out the desired branch (`git switch develop`) and pulling in the changes from upstream (`git pull`).
+
+Another thing to keep in mind: `groovyw module update-all` only attempts to update whatever branch is checked out at the moment - it does not _reset_ onto the default branch, and it might just fail if there are uncommitted changes, for instance.
+
+### Updating my Omega Workspace
+
+For my Omega workspace I used my little CLI tool [node-gooey](https://github.com/skaldarnar/node-gooey) to inspect the current status.
+
+```
+gooey workspace status
+```
+
+With nearly 150 modules checked out the inspection alone takes about 10 seconds, but I got a good overview whether there are any changes in a module and which branch they are on.
+
+![](node-gooey-status-omega.png)
+
+Following that, I did a _hard reset_ of everything, including the engine itself, to the respective default branches (that is, in all cases here, `develop`):
+
+```
+gooey branch reset
+```
+
+Most modules were still up to date and there was nothing to be done.
+Only one module and the main engine repo were changed, and my workspace should be good to go again. 
+
+The complete run took about 7s to update all modules.
+
+![](node-gooey-branch-reset-omega.png)
+
+### Updating my Josharia's Survival Workspace
+
+Yes, I do have a dedicated workspace with all the modules required to work on _Josharia's Survival_, one of the main game modes. 
+While it is possible to just work with one big Omega workspace, dedicated workspaces per game mode are really handy when working on features for a specific module line-up. 
+I can leave the workspace in a work-in-progress state with experimental features without affecting other game modes.
+
+With roughly 60 modules checked out, this workspace is about a third of a full Omega workspace. 
+The status check with `gooey workspace status` shows a couple of repositories in blue, indicating that they are behind their upstream counterpart. 
+
+As everything is already on branch `develop`, I gave `groovyw` another chance to compare its performance against the `gooey` CLI:
+
+```
+groovyw module update-all
+```
+
+As expected, there were no changes found for most modules, and for those lacking behind I could see that they were updated.
+The whole run took 13 seconds, followed by a very quick `git pull` to also update the engine itself.
+
+![](groovyw-update-all-js.png)
+
+A final status check showed that everything is green - another workspace ready.
+I finished my round of updates with `gooey branch reset` on my other workspaces for _Light and Shadow_ and _Metal Renegades_ and should now be ready to get my hands on the code again.
+
+---
+
+It is worth noting that `groovyw` does not only work for modules, but also for libraries (`lib`), facades (`facade`) and meta repositories.
+In addition, there are more features, like creating a dependency graph for Graphviz in the [DOT language](https://graphviz.org/doc/info/lang.html).
+To learn more have a look at `groovyw usage`.
+
+On a related note, there is also a PR ([#4805](https://github.com/MovingBlocks/Terasology/pull/4805)) attempting to rewrite `groovyw` into a more powerful CLI tool for managing Terasology workspaces.
+
+Happy Coding!