[Beowulf] Thoughts on git?

[Tim Cutts]

I agree it is quite intimidating, but the basic version control features are pretty basic; if you don’t want to branch/merge, you don’t have to.  Neither do you have to do all the git pull/push to another git instance somewhere else.

You can do basic version control on an entire directory with just two commands:

git init

to start controlling the directory and its contents and

git commit –a

each time you want to save the current state into the repository.  At this point you’ve got the same functionality as old-school rcs, plus the ability to deal with removing, adding and renaming files.

Others have already been eloquent about good reasons to use git in a more sophisticated way, so I won’t repeat what they’ve said.

git is something you’re going to be forced to use though, anyway, in other contexts.  If you want to participate in pretty much any open source project now, you do kind of need to know some basic git stuff.  I am by no means a git expert (I don’t know what re-base actually means, for example)

One thing I started doing recently was deploying a containerised application, the source of which lives on github.  I need to make some changes to the docker configuration to make it work in our network environment, so I have some local customisations in a branch.  Pulling down new versions from upstream is now pretty simple (and I’ve had to do that every couple of weeks recently).  Manually re-making my changes would be a PITA, but I don’t have to do that because git merge does it for me.  I’m probably doing it wrong, but updating the system for me becomes a matter of:

git checkout master
git pull
git checkout sanger_prod
git merge master
# check it all worked
git commit –m “Merged upstream for <reason>”
docker-compose up -d --build

Not too painful.

Tim

On 19/12/2017, 16:11, "Beowulf on behalf of Faraz Hussain" <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of info at feacluster.com> wrote:

    I am curious what people think of git. On one hand everyone seems to  
    be using it and proclaiming its virtues. On the other hand it seems  
    way overkill for how the majority of people code.
    
    I maintain dozens of scripts to manage various HPC environments . None  
    are more than a few hundred lines long. To do backups of scripts, I  
    just copy them to some backup folder. Occasionally I might tar them up  
    and copy them to a different server. I have never had a need to go  
    back to an older version of my script.
    
    So I tried to learn git but find it very confusing. It seems designed  
    for teams of developers working on some million+ line of code project.  
    For my rinky-dinky scripts it just adds a lot of confusion. It seems I  
    need to "commit" to using git everyday in order for it to be  
    effective. Otherwise, use it or lose it.
    
    Should I force myself to use git everyday? Or maybe find some  
    incrementally better way to manage backups of my scripts?
    
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