Git
Written on December 21, 2008 by george
For those readers of my blog who don’t live in the rails world I highly recommend checking out Git, a distributed version control system. It has been big in the rails world since early this year for several good reasons:
- It has distributed and offline functionality
- Making and merging branches is a breeze – encouraging you to try experiments in branches
- It uses much less space than alternatives, such as Subversion, and only has one .git folder at the base of your project
- It’s in active development with constant releases of new features (but stable enough to be used for the linux kernel)
The terminology is slightly different from subversion and friends but once you’ve got used to it you never look back!
Merb was very quick to jump on the git bandwagon and rails followed not much later. Practically this made distributed development a hell of a lot easier, but it also had some nice knock on effects. Patching is now a lot quicker too – you simply fork the project, make a fix and inform the admin who can then choose to merge back into the master (if they see fit). It’s made the process for fixing bugs a hell of a lot quicker.
Soon after git came along the fantastic github.com followed making it easy to host remote repositories. And so to the reason for me writing this post – github just launched git pages where you can upload your own page to front your repositories. It’s a neat idea and naturally is all managed through a git repository. You simply create your site in a repository, push to github and the deployment is automatic. Although it’s only simple HTML pages, it’s a great proof of concept of other things that could be possible. My effort can be found here which following the git ethos I just forked from somebody else
