February 22, 2011

Git, Showoff, XBox Kinect (Changelog Interviews #49)

53 minutes

Kenneth and Wynn caught up with GitHubber Scott Chacon to talk about Git, distributed version control, and his quest to kill Word as a book authoring tool.

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Featuring:

Scott Chacon – GitHub, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Kenneth Reitz – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Scott Chacon, Git evangelist, GitHubber, author of ProGit

rsync is a software application for Unix and Windows systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate.

Perforce is a commercial, proprietary, centralized revision control system developed by Perforce Software, Inc.

Git Internals, Scott’s PeepCode PDF

Chris, Tom, PJ, founders of GitHub

Continuous integration is one of Git’s strengths

Surprisingly, Scott’s .gitconfig isn’t pimped out

gitk The git GUI repository browser

gitx Git GUI for OS X

gitgui Unlike gitk, git gui focuses on commit generation and single file annotation and does not show project history.

Why Git and not Mercurial?

Mercurial bookmarks are references to commits that are automatically updated when new commits are made. If you do hg bookmark feature the feature bookmark refers to the current changeset.

hg-git is the Hg-Git plugin for Mercurial, adding the ability to push to and pull from a Git server repository from Mercurial.

BitBucket is to Hg as GitHub is to Git

Scott says he had good intentions in comparing Git to other version control systems and was not lobbing stones at Mercurial

Scott says distributed source control systems are key to helping the open source community thrive because it lets anyone commit and get involved

The RubyGems.org 404 is amusing

libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library with a solid API, allowing you to write native speed custom Git applications in any language which supports C bindings.

GitHub has continued the libgit2 Google Summer of Code effort, supporting Vicent Marti to continue the development

Scott says that Git is basically a key value store and we should look at uses beyond version control

Eclipse is moving to Git away from CVS

Git Tower is a beautiful Git UI for the Mac

Showoff is a Sinatra web app that reads simple configuration files for a presentation. It is sort of like a Keynote web app engine.

Kinectaby, Ruby bindings for XBox Kinect

Wynn is excited about Scott’s project Git Scribe for writing, feeling the pain of using Word for archaic book publisher workflows

Jason J Williams’s tools have lessened the pain for Wynn in writing the upcoming Sass book for Manning

Everybody that works at GitHub is Scott’s programming hero but Ryan Tomayko is one of the smartest developer’s Scott knows.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

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