Falling for Git

You know what? Git must have come a long way in the last year. I keep reading that Git is hard to learn, has rough documentation, etc. But it’s really been quite nice in comparison to many things.

It’s especially nice once you quickly learn that the HTML man pages for Git follow a simple pattern (as I guess many online man page collections must). Just change the end of the URL from git-cvsimport.html to git-push.html or git-pull.html to look up documentation.

That I’ve been able to play around with Git quite successfully and easily just makes my frustration with some Python tools (like easy_install and zc.buildout, particularly its recipes) even more …. frustrating.

And, I’ve totally fallen in love with Git. Yes, I know there are alternatives written in Python that are quite comparable. But Git’s actually been easier to install and figure out (particularly the CVS interaction that I must currently suffer). And people who know me know that I’m no “Kernel monkey”. I’m really impressed with Git’s implementation and general behavior. Very impressed with the implementation.

By the way: if you’re having to work two ways with a CVS repository, this post has been absolutely invaluable. This collection of Git articles has been invaluable in getting some good defaults established, and some tips for building on Mac OS X (with a nice tip to download and untar the man pages directly instead of trying to build them with the asciidoc tool and its terrible dependency on troublesome XML libraries. Goddamn, how I hate XML).