Git control of your source

Git is not the next step in evolution of centralized source control, following in the footsteps of cvs, svn, etc. These tools provide centralized history of deltas, where git provides distributed history of trees of content. In this talk, you will see the advantages of the git approach:

Incredible speed. Local, disconnected operation. Source control workflow customized to your team. Centralized, distributed, or layered, you can build it with git. Cheap and easy branching, tagging, and merging. Editing and refactoring your commits.

You have probably heard about git by now, perhaps something along these lines: "Git is a version control system, and it is more powerful that Subversion in every way. You don't even have to be online to commit!"

This is true, but it undersells git. Git is not the next step in evolution of centralized source control, following in the footsteps of cvs, svn, etc. These tools provide centralized history of deltas, where git provides distributed history of trees of content. In this talk, you will see the advantages of the git approach:

  • Incredible speed.
  • Local, disconnected operation.
  • Source control workflow customized to your team. Centralized, distributed, or layered, you can build it with git.
  • Cheap and easy branching, tagging, and merging.
  • Editing and refactoring your commits.

The git community prefers power to ease of use, and so git's user interface and documentation can be intimidating. You will learn the straight and narrow path for common, day-to-day git operations. You will also learn git's underlying data model, and get a quick introduction to more advanced concepts like submodules, cherry-picking, and bisection.

As a final bonus, you will see how to use git on an existing subversion project. You can use git as your svn client, and the rest of the team can stay on svn and not even care.


About Stuart Halloway

Stuart Halloway

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps companies adopt agile, as well as innovative technologies such as Clojure and Ruby on Rails. Stuart is the author of Programming Clojure, Rails for Java Developers, and Component Development for the Java Platform. Prior to founding Relevance, Stuart was the Chief Architect at Near-Time, and the Chief Technical Officer at DevelopMentor.

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