Git -- Anyone "get it"?

[Owen Densmore]

OK, I keep seeing Git usage popping up all over the place, even being  
integrated in CMSs (content management systems).  But I thought it was  
just the next source control system that people keep plaguing me with.

Does anyone "get it"?  I.e. other than being authored by Linus, and  
being distributed and apparently spookily decentralized, why oh why is  
it The Next Big Thing?

     -- Owen



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[Douglas Roberts-2]

I been using Subversion for years. See no reason to git git yet.

--Doug

On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

OK, I keep seeing Git usage popping up all over the place, even being integrated in CMSs (content management systems).  But I thought it was just the next source control system that people keep plaguing me with.

Does anyone "get it"?  I.e. other than being authored by Linus, and being distributed and apparently spookily decentralized, why oh why is it The Next Big Thing?

   -- Owen



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--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

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[Parks, Raymond]

Douglas Roberts wrote:
> I been using Subversion for years. See no reason to git git yet.

  I don't use git or Subversion (I'm forced to write reports and manage
the people who do) but one reason some of our folks like git is that it
is like Subversion - enough to make the transition easy.

  Others among our developers prefer Monotone because of the authentication.

--
Ray Parks                   [hidden email]
Consilient Heuristician     Voice:505-844-4024
ATA Department              Mobile:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:800-690-5288


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[Giles Bowkett]

Hello all, I kinda poked my head into my friam folder for the first
time in ages and saw this. So I've been on git exclusively at work for
the past year, roughly, and on GitHub (like a Myspace of code) for
maybe a year and a half, or two years.

The big win with git is branching. You can go off on a tangent,
explore it, abandon it, pull pieces of it back into the main branch,
etc. If I understand correctly forking a project was kind of a faux
pas or a dramatic step under systems like svn/cvs/rcs/etc. Forks are
so painless on git that they're the default way of working; on GitHub,
if you find a project you like, step one is to fork it.

There are people who say Mercurial is like Git but better, but I
haven't yet checked it out (http://instantrimshot.com/).

The Next Big Thing status comes partly from the trendy mania in
certain corners of the open source world (e.g., the Ruby/Rails
communities, where I spend almost all my coding time), but also has
some validity to it. There's a good blog post about it here:

http://www.advogato.org/person/apenwarr/diary/371.html

Next Big Things are fun but you'd have to be crazy not to reserve some
skepticism for them. However, fwiw, I enjoy working in git much more
than working in subversion. The flexibility it enables means I'm a lot
more free to experiment than I would be otherwise. One of my projects
has so many different branches that I consider equally useful (or
near-equally useful) that I've considered the possibility that the
best way to deal with it might be to examine all the branches for
their commonalities and factor those commonalities out into a base
library.

In terms of organizing group projects, branching and merging are
trivial, so every new feature or bugfix gets its own branch. git will
do weird things from time to time, but I definitely prefer it over
svn.

--
Giles Bowkett
http://gilesbowkett.com

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[Jochen Fromm-4]

Too many branches are confusing in both version controls,
in SVN and Git alike. Both are doing basically the same thing
(like Test::Unit and RSpec). It is easy to make a new branch
in SVN, too, but the problems arise if you make different
changes in different branches. It is confusing to have too many
different versions, and neither SVN nor Git solves this problem.

-J.

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