Git, one month on

I've been using Git for about a month now. Overall, everyone has been right about it -- it's got some heinous usability problems, but man is it kick ass to have distributed version control.

For instance, I've taken a few trips since I switch to Git, and I've committed on an airplane at least twice now. This seems like a small thing, in that I could always wait to commit, but I'm often surprisingly productive in planes, and there are plenty of things you can't actually recover from in SVN without the full repository (e.g., moving directories around).

The cool things about Git don't all require its distributed aspect -- for instance, its branching is far superior ot SVN's (if you could say SVN even has branching). I found myself three commits into some work last week that really should have been a separate branch. With Git, this was really easy to do -- I branched from the current state, then rewound the current branch to remove the commits I didn't want in it.

I was in a branch named indirection, and I decided it made sense to make a new branch named configurations.

Using the git reset man page, this is what I did:

$ git branch configurations
$ git reset --hard HEAD~3
$ git checkout configurations

This left me in the new branch I wanted and left the indirections branch in the state it was at before I made the big changes.

It's clearly not all peaches and cream, though. As I mentioned, there are definite usability issues. It's not so much that you can't figure it but that it's just seldom what you expect. It doesn't help that the majority of the examples are from Linus's life, and his life is far more complicated than most, in terms of managing repositories.

The mechanism for pulling, fetching, and pushing branches is especially counterintuitive.

Overall, though, I'm very happy with it.

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 | Tags: tools, git, scm, dscm, svn, cvs

Linus on Git responding to KDE

Linus Torvalds posted a lengthy response to someone from the KDE community about using Git with KDE, and it's definitely worth a read:

Practically speaking, you'd generally have one or a few central repositories, yes. But no, it really doesn't have to be a single one. And I'm not just talking about mirroring (which is really easy with a distributed setup), I'm literally talking about things like some people wanting to use the "stable" tree, and not my tree at all, or the vendor trees.

And they are obviously connected, but it doesn't have to be a totally central notion at all.

Think of the git trees as people: some people are more "central" than others, but in the end, the kernel is actually fairly unusual (at least for a big project) in having just one person that is so much in the "center" that everybody knows about him.

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 | Tags: tools, git, kde, scm, dscm, svn, cvs