How to update your copy of the repositories¶

Lino is in constant development, so you will probably often need to update your copy of these repositories. Because Lino is a series of repositories maintained by the same team, it is recommended to always update all related repositories at the same time.

To update your copy of the Lino sources, you do:

$ pp git pull

See the documentation of git pull for more information.

After running git pull it is a good idea to run inv clean:

$ pp inv clean -b

This removes all .pyc (compiled Python) files. See e.g. here for other methods. This is not necessary most of the time because Python automatically recompiles them when needed, but there are situations where you get problems caused by dangling .pyc files.

Note that you don’t need to re-run pip install on these updated repositories since you used the -e command line option of pip install (as instructed in Install your Lino developer environment).

Keep in mind the difference between repositories and virtual environments. Cloning a local copy of the Lino repositories from GitHub is a relatively time-consuming operation (it takes a few minutes). Once you have cloned the repositories, you probably won’t need to do this operation again. You just update them using git pull. You can also switch them to specific versions using git checkout. But virtual environments are cheap. You can easily create new ones, install Lino into them, throw them away.

It can happen that Lino’s dependencies change. And simply pulling new sources won’t update these. One possibility is to find out what’s missing (by reading the error message or the blog or by asking) and installing the missing packages. Another (not yet well tested) possibility can be to create a new virtualenv (as explained in Set up a virtual Python environment).