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Avogadro, Git, GitHub and New Toys

Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell on

I have been using Git and Git SVN for quite some time now. It took me a little while to get into Git and see what all the fuss with DVCS was about. Now I find myself enjoying using Git more and more when it is the only version control in use in a project.

Git SVN is certainly a great compatibility layer, and it has allowed me to use Git as my version control system locally without requiring that the projects I contribute to switch. I had heard lots of good things about GitHub, but had not found the time to check it out until Geoff showed me Avogadro after he had pushed it to GitHub. There are some great stats and it looks like is has some great features. I was originally put off by the 100MB limit on storage as it seemed a little low.

When I got home yesterday evening I started playing with it and ultimately made three Avogadro repositories - the third one looks like it is the charm. I had not been worried about importing author metadata previously as I had just been using it locally, but after reading this short guide to migrating to Git I had all the tools I needed. A short trawl through our mailing lists, web pages and history to update author information and I had a shiny new Avogadro git repository.

I am still getting the hang of how all this works. I have added several other committers it matched up as collaborators, but did not spot what exactly that means yet. I was able to get CIA working in our IRC channel, pushed some changes and even synced up a commit from this morning. So I think all is well and I will likely keep this repo up to date with our development. It only has trunk in it, but shows photos of your friendly Avogadro developers and a really nice visualisation of development over time. I think it should open up with the latest stats first, but other that that am impressed. It complements some of the ohloh analysis quite nicely too.

Now can we all please move our source over to some kind of Git repository please!

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mat69 on :

mat69I started using git offline myself and I would switch to that any day.

Having a local branch for every feature and commiting as soon as something changed is so usefull that I wonder how I was able work without that.

So far I do not know much about git, but a few commands were enough to get me started -- who said git was complicated for starters?

Fabio A Locati on :

Fabio A LocatiI agree with you. KDE should move to GIT, imho.
GIT is pretty easy to learn and is so more powerfull than SVN....that's seems that SVN last change have been made 50 years ago.

mat69 on :

mat69@Fabio I wouldn't go that far. Imo SVN is a good centralized system, yet imo these do not provide a very natural workflow.

With git it's not important if there is a feature freeze or not I can keep my pace of work.
That does not mean that I would not fix bugs, but rather that I do not fix only bugs the last weeks. I have phases where I'm highly motivated and productive -- be it features or bug fixes. With git all that is possible without a hassle.

With git your clothes get cleaner too, and your teeth are whiter than white. :-D

Ok, enough of all that advertising, I simply like the workflow of DVCS.

Marcus D. Hanwell on :

Marcus D. HanwellI did not know about the personal hygiene benfits, but I do quite honestly think that it fits better with the way many open source projects are developed. It is a good time to move too, Git has become much friendlier and there are lots of GUIs/plugins around for it now if you would rather not use the command line.

I am a big fan, but am not sure it would fit KDE unless each application was a repository or something similar. It would be interesting to see, but projects that are just Git seem to be more fun to hack on...

Donnie Berkholz on :

Donnie BerkholzI'd like to see the Gentoo science overlay move to git. Who else commits a lot to it who would be most affected?

Marcus D. Hanwell on :

Marcus D. HanwellI would love to see that too. The KDE overlay has been much easier to maintain as a Git overlay...

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