sweetinsanity

I recently decided to use Git for my personal iPhone development projects. A lot of opensource projects seem to be using GitHub lately, instead of SourceForge or Google Code. For those unfamiliar with Git, here is a brief run down … Git is an opensource distributed version control system developed by Linus Torvalds as a replacement for BitKeeper (a proprietary SCM which was being used for the Linux kernel project).

Main Features of Git

Distributed Workflow

Git makes it very easy for developers to work in a distributed nature. A central Git repository can be set up on a server and developers can obtain a complete copy of the remote repository, make local changes (to their own repository) and then push the changes back to the central repository. There are many benefits to using this approach:

• Git is very fast at generating diffs and providing file history because a complete copy of the repository is stored locally.
• Each local copy of the remote repository serves as a backup and can be restored to the remote repository if need be.
• Developers can continue working if the SCM server goes down.

Branch Handling

Branching is fast and more flexible than Subversion.

How I’m using Git

What I found particularly impressive with Git was how easy it is to get a basic repository up and running. Git provides a few options for setting up a repository, you can set up a repository on the local file system or you can use SSH, the Git protocol or HTTPS on the server side. I have a MobileMe account which provides me with 20GB of hosted storage. I can access this through the WebDav protocol over HTTPS. I followed this guide to get a remote repository up and running. I think this configuration is ideal for solo developers as it serves as a backup on an offsite server (2 copies of the repository, one local and one remote). I simply make my changes in my local copy of the repository and then push them back at the end of the day to the remote repository on my iDisk. I am using GitX as a GUI frontend for the Git command line tools. GitX provides basic Git functionality, allowing you to commit changes, view file history and diffs between revisions.

Some Cool Git Features

Stash

This is a particularly useful feature. Ever been working on some new functionality and been interrupted to fix a bug? Stash allows you to stash (save) your local changes and revert your working copy to the HEAD revision. Then you can safely work on a bug fix, commit it and then re-apply the changes you stashed.

Local Branches

Git allows you to create your own private local branches. These branches can be used temporarily and merged into a remote branch or they can be pushed to the remote server if you wish to make the branch accessible to other developers.