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Torvalds: Happiness is a warm SCM

[Posted June 12, 2009 by jake]

Linus Torvalds is happy about the 2.6.31 merge window, mostly because people have figured out how to use git most effectively. He also provides a bit more detail on the tradeoffs involved in using git (or any distributed SCM really) in a comment response. "Part of the problem is that 'git' is such a flexible tool that you can use it in various modes, and mix things up freely. The whole distributed nature means that there's no gatekeeper, you can do whatever you want. And the flexibility and power is good, but it does mean that it's also easy to make a mess of it - the old UNIX philosophy of giving people rope, and letting them hang themselves with it if they want to. [...] So it takes time for people (me included) to learn the rules that work. And it seems people are learning. And that feels really good."
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Git as a backup tool

Posted Jun 12, 2009 18:03 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I've read it on LWN before, but it merits repeating: even for individual use git is a wonderful tool. Write your code, test it, push it to your repo(s). It is not the fastest transfer tool in the world but it beats rsync at keeping history and flexibility: it is very easty to undo the latest commit, or go back to the state of the repo at a given date.

Torvalds: Happiness is a warm SCM

Posted Jun 13, 2009 7:10 UTC (Sat) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

OK, now that we know the rules, let's code them so people don't each need to learn them all immediately, and make messes until they do.

Torvalds: Happiness is a warm SCM

Posted Jun 14, 2009 1:33 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

Look at Documentation/everyday.txt, Documentation/gittutorial.txt, Documentation/gittutorial-2.txt in your nearest git source.

The material at its homepage is useful, and at git-scm there is lots of documentation, even a book being written by the community.

At the end of the day, what Linus says is very true: git is a very flexible tool(box), in a very real sense you have to find out what workflow suits your objectives and environmemt best.

Torvalds: Happiness is a warm SCM

Posted Jun 14, 2009 10:28 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

It definitely varies by project too. If you work on different projects, you will find that something you use all the time on one project (maybe, branches) is hardly of any use in another. Git puts a lot of tools at your disposal, and there's a good chance one of them will help you get through the day, but it may be a different one each time.

The inevitably result is that Git is complicated. I think that for its main target audience, software developers, this is acceptable in the same way that the complexity of programmer oriented text editors is acceptable. You are going to spend a lot of time using this stuff, don't begrudge the few hours you will need to invest in learning to use it efficiently.


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