DVCS, Thank you.

I’m thrilled to see you guys tackling DVCS. Though, I would have preferred Mercurial. But, I think the bigger picture here are the concepts and differences between an old school SVN, or CVS and the newer VCS. I can’t wait to pick this one up.

Hey Krouper;

I actually would have preferred Mercurial as well. I spent about a week going back and forth between the two when I originally tried to decide which one I was going to use. The decision was sort of made for me though. Git has bi-directional Subversion support, Mercurial doesn’t (yet).

edit: It was brought to my attention that the above paragraph is kind of ambiguous. It’s not that I would have wanted to write a book on Mercurial, but that when I started researching the various DVCS to see what they were capable of I was impressed by Mercurial’s feature set. Git has the killer feature: bi-directional Subversion support. Both are excellent tools, but right now I think Git has the edge.

That was crucial for me, and I think it will be for a lot of people who move to DVCS. It’s hard to get a company to change their VCS server. By treating Subversion as your main upstream repository though, an individual developer or team of developers within the company can make the jump and not require everyone to switch.

Hope the book exceeds your expectations.
-T

Can we expect some info on tracking (upstream) repositories with git?

I find that when I want to contribute to a project, I prefer to do some things ‘locally’ (in my own branch) and then if I’m happy with it, I’ll send a patch to a project. Generating nice patches and tracking the upstream repository (even if it’s not git, but i.e. svn) to keep the patches in sync is something that I’m very interested in (any best practices?)

Also things like github, or putting a repository on your own website might be interesting to spend a few words on.

And last, any idea when (and if) we can expect a first beta pdf book on this?

Hi Jeroen;

Let me answer these in backwards order :-)

We are planning on a beta book and want to have it out soon. How soon is soon? Depends on how quickly I can polish up a few chapters. ;-) I’m definitely looking forward to feedback from the community, so I hope you’ll read it and let me know your thoughts.

GitHub and hosting your own repository are both slated be covered in Appendixes. I’m planning on touching on the gitosis server configuration package too which makes hosting your own Git repository a snap. gitosis also showcases Git as a platform too.

Regarding upstream repositories: definitely! :-) The distributed in the DVCS means Git plans on you working with other repositories, so I’ll definitely be covering that. The book starts off working solo and builds from there. I have a chapter devoted to Tags and Branches which will not only cover the mechanics of creating them, but how to utilize them to their fullest. It’s next up on my list to write as I think it’ll be the most fun to write.

A few best practices for you:

• Treat master as something that should be always deployable
• Do all of your development in local branches, then merge back when they’re ready. This was the hardest for me to get used to. Cheap branches, once you’re used to them, are very liberating though.
• -squash is your friend. Most people are just curious that a new feature is implemented, not in the 20 commits it took to get there ;)

-T

Ha!

So that last bullet point should read as two hyphens, followed by squash and shouldn’t be surrounded with strike tags. Oh, the joys of trying to make mark up thats more readable.

-T

Update: I edited this – I’m going to have to submit a patch mapping squashed to squash… :-)

Travis, looking forward to this book. I’m running my own gitosis server and migrating from svn and bazaar. Looking forward to the beta book!

Glad to see this book in process. Looking forward to buying the beta version as soon as it’s out! :-)

Any further update on when a beta will be available? :-)

Hey Nick;

Soon… very soon. :-)

-T

Just another voice expressing my joy at seeing this book in the pipeline. I plan on getting the beta on the day it’s released.

Thanks.

At book about Git at The Pragmatic Programmers !

Just as I would have expected. Fantastic ! I’m buying and reviewing it right now ;-)