Git changes how developers manage source code versions

By Alex Handy

October 29, 2008 —

When Linus Torvalds three years ago wrote a quick mockup of a version control system for the Linux kernel project, he didn’t expect to trigger a forking revolution. But today, at Google's campus in Mountain View, Calif., Git developers gathered to work on the up-and-coming open-source distributed version control system, which is changing the way developers work.

Junio C. Hamano took over Git shortly after Torvalds made his sample code public. Hamano, now Git's maintainer, said that he was only looking for a way to contribute to Linux.

“I was between projects at work, so it was kind of slow, and at the day job we use Linux a lot," said Hamano. "I wanted to contribute back, but I don't work on kernels, so I can't contribute to the kernel community. So I thought, ‘This source code control system is something [I can do].’

“My primary focus was not about the software but about Linus [Torvalds]. I thought that his having to work on something that was not the kernel was—I don't want to say a waste—but it was something somebody else could do."

Today, the dedicated Git contributors who’ve gathered at Google show just how different their world is by admitting that they're all running Git right now on their laptops.

“It decouples the notion of checkpointing from publishing. In Subversion, those are the same thing,” said Steven Grimm, an engineer at Facebook.

Sam Vilain, a contributor from New Zealand, said Git lets developers experiment with the whole of a project, without worrying about breaking things or losing work.

“After you make a change, if you notice there's a tiny little bug with it, you can go back and change that again,” said Vilain.

With Git running locally, developers push commits whenever they feel like and can fork and experiment to their hearts’ content. Those changes won't bother anyone “until you share [them],” said Vilain. “You share at the end of the day, after a day's work, when you've gone over the code a bit more.”

Many of the developers at the Git Together, the three-day Git gathering on Google's campus, echoed Vilain's sentiment and concurred that Git has made development easier.

Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub, said Git frees developers of worry. “It gives you the ability to experiment. Subversion has that mentality of pushing everything to trunk. God forbid you break it for everybody,” he said.

Git is already used to host many popular open-source projects: The Linux kernel is on Git, and Ruby on Rails lives on GitHub.

Like its Concurrent Versions System, Perforce and Subversion cousins, Git still lives on a central server. But most developers will choose to run Git on their desktop as well, so they can track changes and experiment with the whole project locally. When their code is ready, they choose the changes they want to upload and then connect their local Git with the central hub.

Grimm noted that developers who fly around the world are out of luck if they can't get a network connection to the central Subversion server. But if they pull down the entire project in Git before the flight, he said, they've got everything they need, without fear of having forgotten some obscure package somewhere.

When they land, the relevant code can be uploaded to the server and pasted onto the trunk as a branch. When the time comes to integrate those changes, Git still maintains the previous branch in its history.

Gitting to the point
For the future, Preston-Werner hopes to make Git more Web 2.0-friendly via GitHub. The site offers on-demand repository hosting where everything is public; users pay a fee to have private repositories.

“We're really trying to make the network aspect of Git more easily accessible,” said Preston-Werner. “If I were to go to Rails to submit a patch, I could come here to the official Rails repository and say 'fork,' and … that would make a copy of that repository on my account. I could pull that repository down locally, make changes using Git locally, then push those changes back to my account.

“Now I have a modified repository. I can point Rails maintainers at it or issue a poll request to send them a message to see what I did.”

“The reason that most of us use it is that it helps productivity,” said Scott Chacon, a developer at GitHub. “It provides cheap local branching. It works for really big repositories and really small repositories. And it’s free, and it’s easy to get.

“A lot of people are coming [over] from Subversion. Git helps people work together.”

Related Search Term(s): Git, open source, source control, Google

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