[Techtalk] (forw) Re: So What's So Great About Git?

[Cynthia Kiser]

I meant this to go to the list but forgot techtalk isn't configured to
do that automatically.

Anyway, Wim's response this morning reminded me of another nice thing
about git, the files that contain the versioning data are all
together, NOT strewn in all the subdirectories of your project like
svn and cvs. I was reminded of how this is problematic this week as
my collegue is trying to teach some non-technical staff to use
DreamWeaver on some of our version controlled sites. I am sure that
despite warnings, someone will copy a directory - including the .svn
directory - and I'll spend an hour or two trying to recover from that
without losing their new stuff. Hmmmmmm maybe we should just use the
svn -> git conversion tool and save ourselves some grief. 

----- Forwarded message from Cynthia Kiser <cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu> -----

I can't compare git to darcs because I haven't used darcs. I was all
set to try out darcs because all the smart people I knew were using it
- but the server that distributed it was down all week and I decided
perhaps I didn't have time to experiment with it. 

I converted from a mix of CVS and subversion about a year ago because
the Rails community started using git. I have to admit that it was a
surprisingly difficult transition - mostly because I got ambitious and
wanted to use some of the new toys without fully understanding
them. But I would never go back - expecially for a project where I
might have collaborators and so expect to do a reasonable amount of
branching and merging. With subversion, you need to keep track of your
merge points. With git, branching and merging really is painless. Just
tell git to merge and it does the right thing by default. And I really
love gitk for visualizing how different sets of code are related.

Looking at the things I have bookmarked over at delicious on git, I
see one of them does compare darcs and git - or at least how to do the
"theory of patches" stuff from darcs in git:
http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2007/12/10/how-i-stopped-missing-darcs-and-started-loving-git

Other resources: 

http://gitcasts.com/ - screen casts on using git
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/


----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Cynthia N. Kiser
cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu