On Thursday 2007 October 11, Patrick Doyle wrote:
> burning question, "What can git do for me?" (So far, I have come to
> the conclusion that, for my simple, single developer, branchless,
> linear projects, there's not much that git can do for me that any
> other SCM could do for me. It appears to have been designed to solve
Here's a few things that are relevant to a simple, single, branchless, linear
developer:
- Fast. Git wipes the floor with everything else, so much so that the SCM
becomes a tool in itself, not just a recorder of history. I keep my own
simple projects in git just as much as my complicated, branchy, team-based
projects just to get the following tools fast:
git-diff
git-status
git-commit
git-log
- Small. In every project I've converted from SVN to git, the diskspace
usage has gone down. SVN peppers the working tree with .svn directories,
each of which contains a pristine copy of the last checked in version of
all the working files. On top of that is the repository disk space itself.
Git on the other hand keeps one .git directory at the top of the tree and
that stores the _entire_ repository. It is, in my experience, smaller than
the working tree. That means that git uses less diskspace than svn does
for a single checkout to store everything it needs.
- Useful. The following are so good, that even if you weren't doing any
revision tracking you'd still want to use them:
git-grep
git-diff
- Backup. Backing up subversion repositories requires that you write
yourself a script that uses svnadmin dump. With git I just write a couple
of lines in my .git/config and then git-push produces a highly compact
backup whenever I want. Even better, if a disaster happens it's easy to
pull stuff out of that backup without any additional operations.
- Mobility. This one is a bit distributed, but I hope you'll let me have it.
I often do work on my desktop at home, my desktop at work and my laptop.
By setting my remotes up correctly in git it's really easy to walk to
another system and pick up exactly where I left off from the other
computer. More importantly though, when you accidentally make changes in
two places, there is no danger of data loss.
Even if you aren't doing complicated stuff, git is the way to go. I can't
count the number of ways it's made me more productive and enhanced the code I
write and the documentation of its development. If I never worked on another
group project again I would still use git all day every day.
Andy
--
Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIET
andyparkins@xxxxxxxxx
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