Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
123 lines (91 loc) · 4.08 KB

background-git.md

File metadata and controls

123 lines (91 loc) · 4.08 KB
Raw

Why Git?

I'm going to use Git a fair bit as a way of distributing and gathering work, and it is natural to ask why. Isn't this a course about high-performance computing?

The answer is simply that it is inconceivable to think about doing any kind of professional software development without some kind of source-code or change management software. Performance optimisation is by nature progressive, so we need the ability to:

  • Track changes that are being made, and which changes improve performance.

  • Roll back changes which break the software, as often optimisations lead to subtle bugs.

  • Provide a safe place to work on the next release of a project, while still maintaining the current

While there are other source-code managers (SVN, Mercurial, etc.), Git is very commonly used, and is used in many large companies and important open-source projects (not least the linux kernel).

So my goal is not to turn you into a Git expert (I am not one myself - I use CVS because I am old and lazy), but to at least expose you to the key concepts and ideas.

Why Github?

GitHub is a commercial company which provides hosting of repositories, as well as custom web and desktop GUI tools for interacting with them. However, other companies do exist, such as GitLab, Gitorious, Bitbucket, and so on. We could also set up an in-house server, using open source versions of the software.

So the key reasons for using GitHub over another provider or an in-house git server are:

  • Availability: I trust GitHub to keep their servers up more than I do myself or ICT with a virtual server.

  • Experience: This is a widely used platform in open source projects, as well as many commercial projects. GitHub is big.

  • Cost: They provide free licenses for academia :)

Git Clients

Performing git operations requires some sort of git client. There are a huge number of possible clients, depending on whether you want to work on the command line, or want a GUI. Recommended (free) clients are:

  • Windows:

    • GitHub for Windows Provides a full GUI for managing local sandboxes, and is well integrated with github.

    • TortoiseGIT Another GUI interface, well integrated into explorer using context menus.

  • Mac:

    • GitHub for Mac A GUI from GitHub designed for Mac; well integrated with the file-system and github.

  • Cross-platform:

    • git This is the reference command-line version, and works on all platforms (including Windows, via cygwin).

    • git-gui A cross-platform GUI that also comes with the reference tools (though to be honest, if you want a GUI on Windows or Mac I'd suggest something more specific).

There is something to be said for working on the command line, and a nice thing about git is that you can generally switch from the GUI to the command line depending how you feel. For now, I would suggest sticking to the GUIs though.

Documentation on Git

There are a million tutorials on Git, all aimed at different people. The majority focus on the core concepts using the command line primitives, but the same operations are available through GUIs.

A few I would recommend are:

  • Try Git I'm a fan of interactive learning, so I particularly like this browser-based tutorial (about 15 minutes).

  • Git - the simple Guide This is a very short introduction to Git, takes 5 minutes to read. How much you learn...?

  • Git Succinctly This is actually an e-book that you can download, which goes into a little more detail of the underlying concepts.

  • Pro Git This is a full reference manual for Git, describing the whole thing in a lot of detail. It does a very good job of explaining the concepts with diagrams and examples, but is necessarily quite long.