Nothing worked, and nothing said so

On Saturday, October 3, four sessions were held in both Mac and Windows environments without any conflicts. The coordinator project was able to coexist between the two operating systems, despite initial issues reported on Windows. The source material revealed that the Windows environment lacked essential tools and file locking capabilities, as well as compatibility issues with character encoding.

After installing Python 3.12 and Git for Windows, and adding a python3.exe copy to cover the Microsoft Store shortcut, the hooks still did not throw any errors. The problem lay in a character encoding issue, as Windows prints with cp1252, which does not include the arrow (→), and the hooks were designed to use this encoding. The solution was to set the PYTHONUTF8=1 environment variable, which remains in the global configuration to this day.

The session log closed at 20:37, with the same folder structure on both machines containing 15 repositories numbered V01-V49 for the Mac and V51-V99 for Windows. The session index consisted of 250 rows for 126 files, and instead of regenerating it, the log was merged line by line using git merge=union. Syncing was performed through git across 17 separate repositories.

At 20:54, a session began to change the setup, as both machines were now functional simultaneously. The seventeen separate repositories required only the configuration and open project to be pulled, while every close necessitated two commits and two pushes. In order to achieve this, a monorepo was created, containing 11 projects within four products, each with its own repository. This allowed for shared or deployed projects separately, with the configuration stored independently.

At 21:54, the first commit from the Windows machine was recorded in the monorepo, followed by the first commit from the Mac at 22:24. While the sync layer took up seventeen minutes of the process, the decision to create a monorepo was the primary change. Both the numbering ranges, PYTHONUTF8=1 variable, and relative paths from the user's home directory remain in effect, ensuring both machines continue to write to the log without interfering with each other.

While the report acknowledges that the process has not been flawless since the initial failure, it emphasizes that the first error went unnoticed. In future situations where a new machine experiences a failure resulting in "nothing happening," the report suggests considering whether the error is being overlooked or if there is an underlying issue that requires attention.