Hello all, I kinda poked my head into my friam folder for the first time in ages and saw this. So I've been on git exclusively at work for the past year, roughly, and on GitHub (like a Myspace of code) for maybe a year and a half, or two years.
The big win with git is branching. You can go off on a tangent, explore it, abandon it, pull pieces of it back into the main branch, etc. If I understand correctly forking a project was kind of a faux pas or a dramatic step under systems like svn/cvs/rcs/etc. Forks are so painless on git that they're the default way of working; on GitHub, if you find a project you like, step one is to fork it. There are people who say Mercurial is like Git but better, but I haven't yet checked it out (http://instantrimshot.com/). The Next Big Thing status comes partly from the trendy mania in certain corners of the open source world (e.g., the Ruby/Rails communities, where I spend almost all my coding time), but also has some validity to it. There's a good blog post about it here: http://www.advogato.org/person/apenwarr/diary/371.html Next Big Things are fun but you'd have to be crazy not to reserve some skepticism for them. However, fwiw, I enjoy working in git much more than working in subversion. The flexibility it enables means I'm a lot more free to experiment than I would be otherwise. One of my projects has so many different branches that I consider equally useful (or near-equally useful) that I've considered the possibility that the best way to deal with it might be to examine all the branches for their commonalities and factor those commonalities out into a base library. In terms of organizing group projects, branching and merging are trivial, so every new feature or bugfix gets its own branch. git will do weird things from time to time, but I definitely prefer it over svn. -- Giles Bowkett http://gilesbowkett.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
