28 August 2025
The last 24 hours have been quite productive even having had an evening off to go out for a meal! Once again Mistral has proven that while it gets some things right, it is far from a reliable tool. In hindsight if I had simply done a normal search the right information in relation to submodules in git would have been at hand. That said, debugging the material the chatbot produced in the latest thread HAS given me a better understanding of how the whole process hangs together across VSCode, github and the command line. However I would probably have got there a lot quicker if it had simply answered the question with the right answer, rather than insisting on pages of dross around it.
So where am I today? I do now at least have a copy of my live code base sitting on one side of BeyondCompare and clean download of the github version with folders for all of the packages that I'm actually using. Getting submodules set up on that was the fun that I was learning about while a simple 'git submodule add https://github.com/lsces/submodule.git'; was all that was ACTUALLY needed. Mistral insisted that I had to manually edit the .gitmodule file from the start but that was simply wrong! I still need to make sure that the right version is returned if I hit 'refresh' again as that wiped a lot of the copy back to the previous ones. Fortunately a simple change of branch in VSCode returned the later copy.
The localhost copy of this website is currently not running and is showing smarty errors, but now that I have restored the externals directory with smarty and adodb, syncing that is the next step. It is here that getting the correct version IS important as I am based of a release rather than the current master code. But at least I now know just how to play with that. git is still something of a black art after working with mercurial but I'm slowly wrangling it under control and having found the VSCode equivalent to what Eclipse was providing once the bulk code updates are complete it will be a LOT easier fine tuning things later. I know I should probably have done this from day one, and not wasted so much time, but often a second or third pass see things that were missed the first time around.