Git

I have experience with a number of distributed version control systems (DVCS) including Darcs, BitKeeper, Mercuial, Bazaar and now Git.

Git has a lot going for it, so I've decided to "lease" my soul to it for version control.

Git has some quirks, however. One of them is the notion of "push". Git's push doesn't work as I've come to expect in other DVCSes. Here's a good posting on this quirkiness :

* http://hans.fugal.net/blog/2008/11/10/git-push-is-worse-than-worthless

Here are some things I've done to make Git easier to use. There are probably better ways (ex. Git "native" aliases etc.) to do some of these things, but these work for me. This is a work in progress.

Here are some aliases I put in my .bashrc :

alias gb='git branch'
alias gbv='git branch -v'
alias gbva='git branch -va'

alias gci='git citool'

alias gds='git diff --stat'
alias gdsmfh='git diff --stat master FETCH_HEAD'
alias gdtmfh='git difftool master FETCH_HEAD'

alias gl='git log --pretty=short'
alias glf='git log --pretty=fuller'

To "git" the latest goodies in Git 1.6.x, I like to build it on my systems rather than obtain it thru a package manager.

On Ubuntu server systems, I may be missing some Git build dependencies. I can go into the Makefile and set some values (near the top) to work around this like :

NO_TCLTK=true

It's probably easier, however, to do this to have apt-get grab the build dependencies :

$ aptitude build-dep git-core

This may get some things you may not need (Subversion, CVS), but it makes it easier.

Then just make :

# make prefix=/usr install2
...

Here are a few comments about Git merge strategies.

When you do something like git merge FETCH_HEAD, Git will by default apply a recursive strategy when you pull or merge one branch.

I had a case where I had to pull in commits from a "similar but unrelated" Git repository. I did a git fetch to grab the changes into a local FETCH_HEAD. But when I did git merge with the default merge strategy, the merge failed miserably (lots of conflicts).

When I tried the resolve strategy, the merge failed totally :
$ git merge -s resolve FETCH_HEAD