Developing Upwards

I made the unexpected move with a string of recent projects to drop Git to sync between my different computers in favor of OneDrive, the file sync offering from Microsoft. Its like Dropbox, but "enterprise." Feeling a little ashamed at what I previously would have scoffed at should I hear of it from another developer, I felt a little write up of the why and the experience could be a good idea. Now, I should emphasize that I'm not dropping Git for all my projects, just specific kinds of projects. I've been making this change in habit for projects that are just for me, not shared with anyone else. It has been especially helpful in projects I work on sporadically. More on why a little later. So, what drove me away from Git, exactly? On the smallest projects, like game jam hacks, I just wanted to code. I didn't want to think about revisions and commit messages. I didn't need branching or merges. I didn't even need to rollback to another version, ever. I...

Daniel, at work, ran into a problem of accidentally removing a branch he had just created and made a commit to, thus loosing the days work. This was actually the fault of our internal scripts to manage the branching and merging policy we've set up. By "internal" I mean that I wrote them and it was my fault his whole day of work was gone, so that left it up to me to figure out how to repair the situation and salvage the current commit back from the ether. I thought it might be good to document, in the case that anyone else needs to do this. This works in the case of branch A existing and branch B being removed after a single commit on it and branch B being from A. This means we know commit A and we need to find an unnamed commit, what was B, to recover it. I can demonstrate the recovery process with a simple transcript. ironfroggy:/tmp ironfroggy$ mkdir A ironfroggy:/tmp ironfroggy$ cd A ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git init Initialized empty Git repository in .git/ ir...

James went along with the idea of moving away from CVS quicker than I thought and we put the plan into action last week. I put in the time to the project and started off with the default CVS replacement: Subversion. I really was looking forward to using it at work, until a friend made a subtle suggestion to look closer at the git project, which Linus Torvalds is heading as the version control system of choice for some little thing he's writing called Linux. Needless to say, I was skeptical, given the track record of the developer. Quicker than I realized, I was falling head over heals for the examples of git use I was seeing. I cooked up a latest stable for OS X, as the installer I found was 130MB from the 1MB source tarball. Universal binaries on a project that generates about 145 distinct executables is a real bitch. I whipped up a little script to name git and toss into $PATH , while keeping all the git-* executables and other files tucked away in /usr/local/git/ . I've cl...