Git?

[jducoeur]

Out of curiosity, is anyone in the audience using Git? I've begun to hear about it fairly often (it's Linus Torvald's reportedly semi-radical overhaul of CM), and I'm curious what it's like to use in practice. While I suspect CommYou will continue to use Subversion for its core code, I don't rule out the possibility of something else for the likely eventual open-source components, and I like to stay up on the options in this area...

Comments

[mindways]

No personal experience, but I did recall reading this article which mentions it in contrast to Mercurial (in the context of avoiding code bombs from solo developers working privately).

[jducoeur]

Quite interesting. The social impact (of programmers being able to more easily avoid integrations) hadn't occurred to me, and that's rather serious. He's absolutely right that the average programmer is apt to sit on his code for *far* too long between integrations.

Indeed, I gather that this almost killed Looking Glass, way back before I joined: the Dark Project had everyone silo'ed for many months, working separately on pieces of the engine. When they finally integrated, it was reportedly something of a disaster, and took a long time to pull it all together. I suspect that this is why Tom Leonard, when we moved over to Buzzpad, insisted on weekly integrations as a firm rule, so that nobody could get too far from the mainline.

Thanks for the pointer: useful food for thought...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

No personal experience, but it seems to be named by a man who doesn't care if it takes off in England :)

[jducoeur]

This is apparently a running joke: there's a FAQ question on this very subject...

"a man who"

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

You might know him; he wrote Linux... :-P

[fosveny.livejournal.com]

Personal experience: we decided to use it for OSCAR. I'm slowly, slowly learning it, mostly because I've only worked with PVCS/Merant/Serena and very briefly with CVS before, and I never really used branching.

I like it. I'm finding the 'store and pass deltas' functionality to be extremely useful, even if I haven't fully grasped the 'rebase' bit yet, and I really, really like the way branching works. Cheap, local branches. Yum.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, the strong branching capability is very unusual, and it's easy to see the value in it, especially for OSS projects.

Really, the whole thing is intriguing. I don't think I've seen a genuine rethink in the CM space in *decades* -- Subversion is still fairly similar to MonoCM, the RCS-based tool we built at Intermetrics back in '87ish. So the idea of going back to first principles and building a CM system optimized for the problems of big open source projects is fascinating...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

This was interesting:
http://www.spheredev.org/wiki/Git_for_the_lazy