Steve Hoelzer's Stuff

Time to get git

2007-06-07

When git first arrived on the scene about two years ago, I was very excited to try out a new and different version control tool. I met with limited success.

My interest in git faded as time went on but I recently came across a Google Tech Talk video about git by the inventor himself, Linus Torvalds. (Thanks, reddit!)

Since my first look, git has substantially evolved and there are lots of resources on the web.

• The git homepage has been fleshed out with some background information and several tutorials.

• Wikipedia’s git page is excellent — lots of history, design discussion, and references for more reading.

• How to install git on Mac OS X. (Much easier than my first attempt!) git is also available from Fink, but it is in the unstable branch.

  Here’s a quick summary:

  curl http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.0.5.tar.gz -O
  gunzip git-1.5.0.5.tar.gz ; tar -xvf git-1.5.0.5.tar; cd git-1.5.0.5
  make configure 
  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
  make all 
  sudo make install
  
  
  export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/bin:~/bin
  
  
  git config --global user.name "Your Name Comes Here"
  git config --global user.email you@yourdomain.example.com
  

• How to install git on Windows. It requires Cygwin and is slow, but there might be native options in the future.

• git-svn lets you use git but also interact with a Subversion repository. Also see this tutorial.

• Git’s packing heuristics described in an annotated IRC log. Very entertaining, but it only makes sense if you know a decent amount about Git first.

All that makes me excited to try git again. Like I said, it’s time to get git.

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