martes, 27 de diciembre de 2011

Git, the stupid content tracker, or not so


After roughly a year of using git daily, one has already crossed the "WTF!?" side and now is in the "It's obvious" land.

After getting help from all coworkers I had last year, lots (I mean *LOTS*) of reading, and many moments of "Am I the only one in the world that doesn't get this?", all regular processes go without thinking now, and I know pretty much what is happening under the hood.

Some things are still a bit raw on the edges, but mostly because they aren't used so often (submodules, bisect...), but I digress...

Thing is that using and knowing git gives you extra power, not directly related to versioning code. As Linus said: "git is the stupid content tracker", it manages blobs of bytes.

  • git grep: Probably faster than grep -ri, and more focused to what you surely want to search. I've already integrated it with emacs, and try to use it more and more, instead of rgrep, or ack.
  • git ls: great for the kind of find-file-in-project functionality.
  • git log -Sfoo : Search throughout the history
  • git log -p : modifications in context
  • git annex: manage whatever content
  • using git to deploy: There's capistrano, and puppet, and chef, and... but git can handle it if configured properly. Probably this can end in a mess if you need to trigger many things when deploying. You know, there are hooks and everything, and you cand build your poor-man-capistrano. It's just your choice. But definately for mostly static sites, it's a nice thing to keep in mind.
  • Not really a git feature, but thanks to magit, or fugitive, you can have a pretty painless integration with your workflow, so it's a win. And you feel safer

Have more tricks? Comment!

Ok, after a bit more than a month, there's a post precisely on that. Nothing new in the article, but there are nice insights in YC comments

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