Starting to play with git

Been a mercurial user for a while, mercurial was IMO more mature when we started using it about 1.5 years ago. Git was new, and not quite as easy to deal with. What a difference 1.5 years make. I find starting/importing new projects with Mercurial harder than I like. Its not bad, it just takes a bit more thinking than I want during import. So I tried git tonight. Imported the deltaV tools in. Like butta (like butter, e.g. smooth, easy, and tasty). Creating the repository was easy. Moving data to it was easy. Almost trivial.

Its a little more complicated in Mercurial, but not much. Put it another way … way way back in 2000, we had a CVS repository. CVS was/is terrible. Too many things are broken. It is too easy to mess up with it. Subversion came along, promising to fix many of the things that CVS got wrong. It didn’t. And it added a webdav “requirement”. I was not able to get a working subversion installation going. And I tried off and on for years. Found Mercurial while looking for alternatives. Mercurial is good, but it is dependent upon some python bits/configuration that is at least mildly annoying. This isn’t a Mercurial issue apart from Mercurial being a python code. Took under 10 minutes to get my first repository going, took another 10 or so minutes to get the rest of the system working. Then setting up the web interface, and making sure remote commits worked took another few hours. Tonight I started with git. I created a repository, set up ssh keys, and imported the deltaV tools from the engineering unit inside of about 2 minutes, inclusive of the time to copy and paste the ssh keys, add and commit the stack, and finally move it to permanent storage. Um … we have a winner. Tomorrow I will install the web tools. I’ll also make a set of public git repositories. I’ll leave our existing public hg repository up, but will push new bits to git. Good work folks … Hopefully ActiveState Komodo integrates with it now (it does with Mercurial!).