Surprisingly my last post about git was more well received than I really thought. I promised that I’d collect some of the resources that I found useful when switching to git in a separate post. While this has lingered on my todo list for some time, I’m only now getting around to writing it. Hey, I just write about productivity, I never claimed to be any good at it.
I should also disclaim that I am, by no means, in full command of git. I mean, I use it a lot and greatly enjoy my experiences with git, but there are tons of features that I don’t use that I’m clueless about. Just saying.
If you’re interested in git, try it! At the core, git does something that I think just about everyone who creates something with a computer can use: it provides a way to backup, store, and organize versions of your files. If you use git, or any version control software, even if you don’t write code, even if your only collaborators are yourself working on different machines, you never have to worry where your data is or what happened to that version of the story you were writing three weeks ago that you deleted because you thought that the character was coming off to strong. It’s just there, and being able to really trust your computer with your data is an awesome thing. Really.
Anyway. Resources. Git.
Linus On Git: Linus Torvalds, better known for writing this little thing called the Linux Kernel, wrote git. Here he is talking to google engineers about git, and I think here better than just about anyone else, you can really get a good idea of what it is that git does. There are other videos of talks about git, of course, google will reveal those to you, but for the most basic understanding of how git works (which isn’t essential, but it helps things make sense if they seem a little ass backwards at the onset), this one can’t be beat.
Dream Hosting Git. I use dreamhost for hosting this site, and I push copies of my repositories to bare repositories in a nonpublic directory on my account for backup and remote access. This makes for a much better backup plan, and with git-web everything is pretty swell, but that post outlines all the stuff that needs to be done in order to make it all work in terms of pointing origins and what not so that the pushes all work.
If you’ve used svn before (and you’ve compiled git with svn support) this blog post explains how to import your commit history to git. It’s not something that you’re likely to need to do a lot but it’s good to know how to do.
One of the great things about git is that it theoretically it allows for decentralized collaboration. If you have a git repository, even if it’s not one that you started, you and a friend can push and pull with each other without needing a server. This blog post explains how to do this without mucking up with security holes and the like.
Finally, I found this just a few days ago, but ticgit is a cool python doodad that lets you store a ticketing system (as in for bug tracking and feature requests), inside of a branch in git. Which though not really a replacement for something full fledged like trac, might be good to keep track of your own goals. I can imagine how this might be useful for todo management, though I haven’t used it yet. Someday.
Hope this helps and if you have any good links or resources I’d love to hear about them.
Onward and Upward!