Free Software & Hacking & Linux Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri on 28 Apr 2007 02:05 pm
GIT is really great
I’ve been using GIT as version control system for my Python bindings for Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and I’m really enjoying.
As most FOSS developers, I’ve used CVS for some time, then when SVN appeared I’ve tried and liked it very much, lots of problems that I had with CVS were fixed, but one remaining problem stand still: offline commits. Nothing sucks more than working with huge changes offline and having to maintain the split patches yourself… or creating a local SVN to do it for me and then producing patches and applying to the other repository.
I’ve started my bindings and hope them to get hosted on E.org, so I wouldn’t bother opening a SF project for it, however I don’t like to work without version control system. I was about to issue "svnadmin create" when I was informed about ruby bindings and I saw they use GIT, so I opted to give it a try.
The first thing you will notice is that it’s damn fast! I also like some utilities they provide, that makes day-to-day development cool. I still cannot say how much hurdle is to work collaboratively and neither if I like to pull, push, merge or what, since I’m working alone, but seems that the worst case will be just like CVS/SVN, but there is a comparison of Git and SVN.
If you have not tried GIT yet, checkout the introduction tutorial, “Git crash course for {CVS,SVN} users”, “Everyday GIT with 20 commands or so” and “Introduction to git-svn”.
4 Responses to “GIT is really great”
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on 28 Apr 2007 at 3:51 pm 1.tekNico said …
For some reason, a significant number of people programming in Python is using git.
While I realize it’s not a valid tool-choosing criterion for many people, I do prefer tools written in Python.
There are two very good distributed version control systems written in Python: Mercurial and BazaarNG.
Mercurial is the one most similar to git: it’s fast, small both in repo and code size, and able to handle large code bodies (it’s been written by Linux kernel hackers).
BazaarNG, by Canonical, is more featured, including some SVN integration, but slower and larger.
Both have a command set derived from SVN, therefore are fairly easy to learn.
on 28 Apr 2007 at 3:55 pm 2.tekNico said …
By the way, my comment did not appear right after insertion, and I don’t know whether there was some malfunction.
If comments are moderated you should say so, to avoid such uncertainty.
on 28 Apr 2007 at 5:21 pm 3.Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri said …
Unfortunately comments are moderated to avoid spam… Even with “Akismet has caught 7,366 spam for you since you first installed it.” I still get lots of spam that are avoided by manually approving them.
I’ll check out how to have WordPress to display a message about moderated comments.
on 02 Jun 2007 at 12:26 am 4.glommer said …
Oh yes, mercurial is very fast.
When comparing to a lazy turtle, or massive opengl code running in a 286.
But not, never, when compared to git. I use both mercurial (for the xen repository), and git (for the linux repository), and honestly, while mercurial may have some advantages, speed is definitely not one of them.