GIT

Vital Facts

http://git.or.cz/

GIT is included in Fedora as "git".

http://book.git-scm.com/index.html : Community book.

Pro Git

Graphical explanation of what Git is doing

Preconceptions

GIT seems to be nice. I think I understand how it works, and it is reasonable.

I like the idea that it was designed with the user, not the implementor, in mind.

I like how you can create repositories on the fly. Heck, I have tens of SVN repositories on my machine at home.

I like how branching and mergine aren't really that big of a deal.

I like how you don't have to tell GIT which files to worry about. It worries about the right ones naturally.

Using git

(adapted from http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/tutorial.html)

Register Yourself

git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"
git config --global user.email you@your.org

Have GIT manage your existing code

cd your/project
git init

Check the status of your code

git status

Add files to be managed by GIT

git add file1 file2 ...

Or, you can just use the -a switch on git commit. This will find any new files and automatically add them.

git commit -a

Commit your changes

git commit

Or to add any new files:

git commit -a

See the history

git log

Note that previous revisions are these really long strings. You only need like the first 8 or 10 to uniquely identify a revision, usually.

git show 266ef995c00

Shows what happened for this commit in detail.

git show HEAD

Shows what is on the HEAD.

git show 266ef995c00^

Shows the parent of 266ef995c00. ^^ = grandparent, ~4 = great-great grandparent.

git branch <new-branch> 266ef995c00

Starts a new branch named new-branch from the revision.

List branches

git branch

Asterisk (*) marks the branch you are on. master is the original--mainline or the trunk in other systems.

Create a branch

git branch new-branch

Switch to a branch

git checkout branch-name

Note that when you switch, any files that are modified are preserved. That is, they won't change.

See what's on another branch

git show <branch>

Merge changes from another branch to this one

git merge branch-name

Start a project from someone else's project

git clone path-to-other-project new-path

Pull in changes form another project

git pull path-to-other-project [branch]

Or, if you've already named it with git remote add

git pull name

Using a remote repository

get remote add name path-to-remote-repo

Pulling in changes from a remote repo

get fetch name

TODO

You've Got Some Great Code But You Can't Commit

If you've got some great code you'd like to save, but you can't commit it to the current branch, do this.

1. Save the code.
2. git branch new-branch: Create a new branch
3. git branch: This should show what branch you are on.
4. git checkout new-branch: This will move you to new-branch. Your modified files don't change.
5. git commit -a: This will commit all your changes to the new-branch. The other branch remains unchanged.
6. git checkout old-branch: This will move you back to the old branch. Your files will revert to what they were before you made your most recent changes.

If you want to go back to working on the experimental code, you can commit/revert to get a clean slate, and then git checkout new-branch.

Creating a Release

This is what I've figured out.

I have two directories:

• ~/dev is my development directory. I work on the development version there. It's very unstable, until I have a mind to stabilize it and fix all the bugs. When I've got something that works, I am satisfied and plan on moving it to alpha.

• ~/alpha is where I run the alpha code. I want to keep this mostly stable. I would also pull in other's people changes in there if there were other developers. When I want to pull something in:

cd ~/alpha
git pull ~/dev

Sometimes I find a bug. I fix it and commit it there. If I want to pull the fix back down to my development directory:

cd ~/dev
git pull ~/alpha

This same pattern can be used for beta, etc...