How to bootstrap a course with me

To automate the evaluation of your progress and to check that you meet deadlines we are going to do almost everything in a version control system.
You are free to create a dedicated repository for an arbitrary nonempty subset of courses I teach.

How to bootstrap a repository shared with me

Create a Git or Mercurial repository somewhere. Let <cloneurl> = <public URL of your repository>.

Run the following (for Mercurial, s/git/hg/ everywhere below):
```
git init
```
somewhere, create a README (or, better, README.markdown) in there. Make sure your README is not empty (or else git won’t work)!
```
git add README.markdown
git commit -m 'initial commit with README'
```
Important! Check that cloning and pulling works from the outside of your network.

Run
```
git clone <cloneurl>
```
from rain university server AND from your home computer.

When it doesn’t work the first thing to check is the file modes, e.g. given an git repository at /home/ctd/<something>/<you>/public_html/unix on rain do
```
chmod 755 /home/ctd/<something>/<you>
chmod 755 /home/ctd/<something>/<you>/public_html
chmod -R 755 /home/ctd/<something>/<you>/public_html/unix
```
Services like bitbucket and github solve these problems for you without your input, but then they will store your first embarrassing attempts at coding indefinitely.

If your repository needs to be pulled over SSH, here is my public key for this.
Send a message to <your group university entrance year> (currently year2011 or year2010) at oxij.org from your contact e-mail with the following Subject: field:
```
<fn ru> <ln ru> | <fn en> <ln en> | <course> | <"git" or "hg"> | <cloneurl>
```
where fn — first name, ln — last name, ru — in Russian, en — in English.

Currently <course> has two possible values:
- os for Operating Systems
- fp for Functional Programming
Examples:
```
Василий Петров | Vasily Petrov | os | git | http://example.com/petrov/unix.git
```
```
Василий Петров | Vasily Petrov | fp | hg | http://example.com/petrov/fp
```
- Note that your first name (“имя” in Russian) goes first, last name (“фамилия”) goes next.
- Note that if you wish to use the same repository for two courses you have to send two e-mails.
As for message body anything goes, it’s completely ignored.

How to ask questions

You can ask questions via the same e-mail by sending a message with

<your group university entrance year> | <topic>

(case insensitive) Subject:.

Example:

year2011 | Когда оценки появяться в ЦДО?

Message body is not ignored in this case.

Note. Messages with Subject: fields not formatted as above will be ignored. (As I must know your rain-year-ID to answer your question, and probably also Cc: it to everyone.)

How to check that everything is ok

Find yourself in pullingmachine’s status.txt. It updates at the end of each day on normal days and every two hours near the end a module. A string after a repository name in the status is the date of the last successful pull.

If I teach you (your group) two courses, but your status shows a single repository, then you did something wrong. See above.