During the last year, I have come across a few projects that I would like to download and experiment with; the stopping point has been that they use the SCM tool - Git. A comment from a recent DeepFriedBytes
podcast with
Jeremy Miller indicated that many Windows developers seem to use
Mercurial, and that other developers (non windows being implied?) use
Git. I have used TortoiseSVN successfully, but the start-up story with Git does not appear to be "straight forward". During the DeepFriedBytes podcast, there was mention of using Powershell with Git - which I had seen mentioned in Ayende's
blog (He wrote Rhino-Mocks, RavenDB, and a book on DSLs in Boo). So this post is to collect some research items on how what these two source control packages are and the setup dependencies they require.
As I stated at the start - my impression of Git is that it is not straight forward to get started with; Whereas Mercurial seems to be very simple to use and is supported on Codeplex. The Mercurial association with Codeplex alone, would make it be preferred by Windows developers. Codeplex
works with TFS(Team Foundation System),Subversion, and Mercurial. There is a Free TekPub
video demonstrating how to use Mercurial on a Codeplex project ( Tekpub has a full Mercurial training course of 3 hours for about 20 dollars).
In listening to a podcast -
This Developers Life episode on
Pressure -
The
Stackoverflow team discussed many things and one point they touched
on was - they went to Mercurial - and decided against using Git. The decision to use Mercurial for them was more
of a workflow issue that they needed within the Stackoverflow teams shared working process.
Git - being a command line tool - has attracted some development tools to make it simpler - TortoiseGit, and Posh-Git(Powershell enabled Git). There was a series of posts on the topic of Powershell and Git by Mark Embling
It appears that some of the collaboration on this set of tools was being done on Google Groups - but based on the
page there - the sharing of files and update ability is going away Aug 2011. There is a GitHub project for this
Posh-gitDaniel Hoelbling, in Sept of 2010,
posted how the Posh-git tools got easier; in October 2010 - he
posted that he had moved to Git from Mercurial. Dan also posted a
link on the visual studio 2010 tool
Git-Source-Control-Provider - posted March 29, 2011. There is an installer for VS 2008 - and a VS 2010 Extension you can use from the gallery. On the codeplex site there is a video on how to install Git on Windows 7 by Dan Stewart - and his video goes through the process of installing on Windows 7 - which you note is running MINGW32(Cygwin) console window. Dan Stewart puts up a bunch of Git reference info on a
delicious link.
The
msysgit
- creates a development environment on your machine allowing you to
build Git on your machine. The Git website - in describing Windows
installs for git - leads to the
Cygwin
(which is a Linux API based development environment for Windows) or
as the Git site refers to msysgit -"install the Git Development Environment for Windows" - which is a confusing roundabout way of saying -
msysgit creates a cygwin setup and allows the build of git so you can
use it from your Windows machine. These elements are the prerequisites for using git -
and why I have really wanted to wait before pulling the trigger on
installing Git (in short - emulate Linux within Windows so you can use a source control system - seems like it a bit obtuse in how it gets there).
Since the CodePlex VS2010 extension is available
in the online Gallery - I knew I should be able to see how it would be
setup from the IDE. I installed the Git-Source-Control-Provider and you use
the Tools>Options>Source to select Git as your source control.
When you do that - you see that it has setup commands for the msysgit
and the Git-Extensions and TortoiseGit all in the same setup dialog
window. So it seems like if you are going to commit to using git - you
have a few things to install and the configure under Source Control
plugins within VS2010. It may be simple once you get to that point, but it seems to have a lot of parts that this approach needs to make it work - no wonder people like Mercurial (See the Tekpub video link earlier).
So, if Mercurial is so easy, and Git seems problematic at the startup - why would I want to look into Git more? - the projects that I have found or heard of that seem to be on Github - a free repository for open source projects.
- SpecFlow for TDD/BDD development is on GitHub
- MSpec also for BDD development is also on GitHub
- PSake (pronounced like the Japanese drink) an automated build tool from Powershell is on GitHub
Are just a few of the items that I look at -- and keep me pondering about Git and whether it is worth the very obtuse install process to be on my development machine so I can experiment with these libraries. I keep hoping there is a better way.
It is probably just a matter of time ( and more research) and I will probably pull the trigger and do it - just not yet.