How to make pull requests on GitHub or BitBucket

Github and Bitbucket make it very easy to submit pull requests; probably too easy, in fact. The temptation to just fork somebody's repo, fix the obvious mistake and submit a pull request is quite strong. But that's not how you're supposed to work! So this is basically a dummy's guide to mark this procedure into my brain.

A pull requests marries the entire branch to the one you're targeting; if you keep making changes here and there, a pull request will include all these new changes, regardless of when you originally opened it. It makes your request basically un-mergeable by upstream repositories, in most cases.

So the real procedure is:

1. Fork the upstream repository. Now you have your own master branch. Clone it locally as usual.
2. Create a new branch, either via web or (easier) from the command line with git branch FixBugBranch && git checkout -b FixBugBranch. 
3. Make your changes on this FixBugBranch. Make only the minimum amount of changes necessary to fix a specific issue, then commit and push.
4. On GitHub, create a pull request from FixBugBranch towards the original repository
5. When/if your pull request is accepted upstream, you can delete FixBugBranch.

If you want to make further changes, you can either create a further branch from FixBugBranch, or create and merge a pull request from FixBugBranch into your master. The important thing is that you don't touch FixBugBranch anymore, so that upstream maintainers won't receive all your extra commits but only ones relevant to the particular bug you raised. 

Unicode URL-handling in web.py

Web.py is a lovely tool I'm currently using for a silly project (warning: explicit Italian language). Unfortunately, it does some clever things to support URLs containing Unicode, but then drops the ball when it comes to actually do anything with them (i.e. dispatch/route them as expected, using regular expressions that actually match Unicode objects).

This was a real problem in my app, so I came up with a quick and dirty patch, which may or may not work for you and may or may not break other things. Basically I've tracked down the regex operations on URLs, and added Python's re.UNICODE flag to them, so that unicode characters will be matched as "\w" etc.

Feel free to tell me where I'm going wrong -- I'm not a web.py guru by all means -- but this little patch significantly improved my quality of life today, so to speak.

Safari extension to show XML

A few months ago I started using Safari for most of my browsing, because I love trackpad gestures and I'm a sucker for smooth animations. However, if there's one thing that Safari gets spectacularly wrong, it's dealing with XML. As far as I know, in Safari 6.x there is no way to display raw XML, the damn browser will always try to launch an external feedreader, and even selecting which feedreader requires industrious hacking that I'd rather avoid. This is particularly annoying when some memory-hungry, battery-burning giant application hijacks this process: in my case, VmWare Fusion will always try to launch one of my images, which is just terrible.

To cut the story short, I wrote a small extension to prevent this horrible process. When I want to have a look at an XML file, I right-click on the link and select "Show me that feed". The result is a slightly-formatted view of the file, in a new tab.

You can download the ShowMeThatFeed Safari extension on BitBucket.

I haven't been a web-plumber for more than 10 years now, so I'm sure it can be dramatically improved -- the formatting in particular is implemented with regexes (argh). Please feel free to fork the BitBucket repository for ShowMeThatFeed, pull requests are very welcome.

UPDATE: Apologies, I've pushed quite a few updates (included some buggy ones!) in the last few hours, but now it should work fine.