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:

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.

Scott

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