By Peter Bell

The Rise of Git for Version Control

Posted At : April 25, 2008 9:48 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Subversion
Over the last few weeks, Linus Torvalds latest pet project has really taken off. I've signed up for an account at GitHub, sill haven't got round to getting started or using the Eclipse plugin. Today I got an email informing me that Unfuddle is offering Git.

Their announcement: If you have not yet heard of Git, it is a distributed version control system, originally developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. It has grown over the years to serve as the development platform for many other very large and active open source projects. It has grown for a very simple reason: it is excellent.

Effective May 15th, Unfuddle customers will be able to choose between Git and Subversion repositories for their projects. Subversion is not going away, we are just adding Git as an alternative.

Anyone out there played seriously with Git yet? What do you think?

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I've read a bit about it. But we are too entrenched in SVN to move to anything else. :)

I could see GIT being a big boon if you have developers all over (like the Linux code) but for a company or team in an office - I don't see any big benefits over SVN...
# Posted By Jim Priest | 4/25/08 11:10 AM
Lack of native Windows support is the only thing preventing me from introducing it to my team at work but if that was fixed I'd be all over it. Even though we're a small team and all in once place there are indeed big benefits over SVN: Branching and merging is much easier to do and it's also much faster to work with in general because you're always working locally and don't have to connect to a central repository for every commit.
# Posted By Adam Soltys | 4/25/08 11:43 AM
take a look at assembla

http://www.assembla.com/

it has hosting for svn, mercurial and git, plus trac integration. also they have a free account. We're looking into it right now to replace our elementool's account.
# Posted By tony petruzzi | 4/25/08 2:22 PM
@Tony, I used Assembla for a project. It was fine, it was free, but I preferred Unfuddle personally. I just don't find trac meets my needs the way it's usually set up - the pm tools in Unfuddle were a better fit for what we needed.

But honestly, github for me is all about getting into git instead of svn to see if I like it as much as a bunch of the people I respect do.
# Posted By Peter Bell | 4/25/08 2:29 PM
anyone willing to voice a comparison between this and, say, SourceForge Enterprise (which I'm currently assessing)?
# Posted By barry.b | 4/26/08 8:35 AM
Sorry Barry - not something I've looked into. What are you using now and what is it about sf ent. that you are hoping to get you don't currently have?
# Posted By Peter Bell | 4/26/08 1:02 PM
for the bunch of friends I know and advising - they got nuthin' (well, manual snapshots of code, shared dev server, sharepoint pages for bug and test tracking).

I suspose it's like a girlfriend - they're all capable of cooking dinner and keeping you warm in winter. but it's the little things like snoring or leaving the toothpast lid off that can sometimes drive you nutz... things you don't immediately notice unless you look for them under evaluation...
# Posted By barry.b | 4/26/08 6:35 PM
@Barry, If they're all about .net, they should probably consider VSS. If not, subversion (svn) is the obvious default choice. Git makes distributed development much easier, repos are easier to create and share for little ad hoc projects, and you can get local versioning without havign to commit to a central repository so if you want to go off on a bit of a tangent you can do so without having to create a branch and then merge it back later.

However, git is still for early adoptors, doesn't have as much support or tooling, so for a general team, I'd start them off on subversion.
# Posted By Peter Bell | 4/27/08 3:34 PM
Anyone interested in Git should listen to Hanselminutes podcast #108 (http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=1... The podcast is generally geared towards a .NET audience, but this episode includes a discussion with a couple of Mac developers using Git and SVN.

There's also Bazaar, another distributed source control system that appears to have a better Windows experience.
# Posted By Seth Petry-Johnson | 4/29/08 12:40 PM
@Seth, Thanks for the heads up, I didn't really expect Hanselminutes to cover something like Git!
# Posted By Peter Bell | 4/29/08 1:37 PM
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