Owing to driver error, I lost all my versions for the Codea project (and everything else I had versioned). Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

My code manager on the iPad is Working Copy, an excellent git application. I had some trouble setting it up to manage the Orc project, which I think I mentioned in the articles. I finally got it set to manage all the Codea projects as if they were one huge project, but I didn’t realize that was what had happened: I thought it had just put all of them under individual version control.

When I realized what had happened, I started undoing what I had done, in hopes of getting to a more sensible situation. Everything I tried made it worse, until I was in a situation where I couldn’t delete anything, couldn’t revert anything, couldn’t commit anything.

I wound up deleting all my Working Copy projects, intending to reconnect to them. I might lose some versions but as a rule I never go back other than right in the throes of developing, when I might revert one tentative thread when I’ve messed up.

In the end, I wound up with no repo. I emphasize, this was all my own mis-doing. Working Copy is a great little app. I was just a bad driver.

A note to the author, Anders Borum, gave me the info I needed to get things set up right. Turns out there is an iOS 13 change that changed how you have to set up Codea, because Codea files aren’t quite folders in the mind of iOS. (I don’t know more detail.)

Here, for the record, is the info I got from Anders:

Hi Ron

Something unfortunately changed in iOS 13 such that a document picker can either be used to pick folders or used to pick documents but not both. Codea documents are directories but not folders which makes them sort of fall between the cracks.

The solution is to create an empty repository or clone any existing repository matching a Codea project, then invoke the share sheet for this repository where you pick “Setup Package Sync” that will let you pick Codea projects. It is no coincidence that the icon for this action looks like this.

Best regards, Anders

With that information in hand, I rolled back my Orc code to zero, and worked through the articles forward, saving versions at every opportunity, and synching by copy/paste when I had a clear summary in the article.

The upshot is that I should have a clean copy of the Orc now, that corresponds well to the articles, and is under version control.

The version right now is a direct copy of the last full display of the code, in article number 6. So we should be all lined up. If there are discrepancies, let me know, but I think we’re OK and certainly close enough that there should be no surprises.

I’d just like to say again that Working Copy is a really nice app for version management on the iPad, including (for a small fee) integration with GitHub and similar capabilities. For repos just on the iPad, the free version works fine.

So that’s my report. I messed up and have mostly recovered, much as has probably happened to most of us from time to time. My own fault.

We’ll end this little report here and move on to a clean sheet of paper for the next article.