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Aug

13

Got GitHub?

Filed Under business, life, recommendations, ruby, technology |

10 points for most original title, ever.

Lately, my company and I have been looking into the benefits of switching to Git for source code repository management. Its currently the new “hotness” of the hacker world, and with some of the claims that I’ve read, its pretty hard to ignore.

Linus Torvalds has made a few references to how much he hates tools like Subversion and CVS, and he has a lot of interesting reasons for feeling the way he does. I don’t agree with everything, but then again, I am not writing a kernel. Subversion has worked great for me and my team in the past, but we are definitely starting to envy some of the Git advantages.

Its indisputable that Git makes it unbelievably easy to branch and tag your repositories, hands down. The bigger and more integrated my codebase and team is getting, the more of crucial of a feature that is to us. Decentralization is not a big deal to me. Frankly, I never am really “off the grid”, so most times I just do git commit followed by a push.

Fortunately for us, Unfuddle supports Git now, so its easy for us to use our existing project management tool with this new technology, at no extra investment! But, I have to take a moment to say, GitHub is definitely pretty killer. Unfuddle’s support for Git is new and will improve over time, but I am very very impressed with how well GitHub has nailed the integration. The biggest reason for me to move (some) of my code to GitHub is for the public aspect of it. From this point forward, I will be posting my company and I’s open source contributions there. Mostly because Unfuddle doesn’t provide external access to projects in the same way, which is actually sort of strange in my opinion.

Maybe in the future I will be so inclined to product an Unfuddle-Git bridge to keep my repositories (edit: there is one already, why isn’t this a part of GitHub yet?!) synchronized, for projects I plan to open source. Overall, I am pretty happy with Git, I think my initial impressions of it were tainted by the “growing pains” I experienced while trying to get it to work with Unfuddle. Seriously, with GitHub I was up and running with the repo in under 2 minutes!

You can check out my repositories here. There is one project there now that I haven’t talked about too much yet, mostly because I just built and released it in the last 72 hours. More on that soon!


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3 Comments so far

  1. Rob Wilkerson on August 16, 2008 5:52 pm

    I’d be interested in your take on how Git makes branching & tagging easier. I’m just beginning to investigate a change, myself, but mostly for the decentralization (great for planes, outages, etc.). I’ve never found branching/tagging in Svn to be difficult of problematic in any way.

  2. Rob Wilkerson on August 16, 2008 5:54 pm

    And, unrelated, is there any way to select to be notified of additional comments or subscribe to a comments feed? I’m not seeing anything obvious.

  3. Derek P. on August 16, 2008 10:46 pm

    @Rob, branching and tagging in git is really a fascinating thing. Its literally 1 command to create a branch, and the way that a “git managed” project works, it allows you to essentially “jump” into any number of branches, and the filesystem reflects the current state of the branch, automatically! (ie: you can have 1 project folder, but 2 branches with different files, and the directory contents is updated magically). Tagging is just as simple as well.

    You don’t have to do any of that confusing stuff that is required with CVS or SVN, its really much more simplistic, and robust.

    Also, I guess I don’t really have a comment subscription thing, sorry :(. Dunno what my options are with wordpress.