Last week, we hosted a webinar on git, focusing on workflows and practices you can adopt when you move to git. We discussed two of the more popular branching models used internally at Atlassian in depth, and gave practical examples on how git can allow you to reduce friction and increase the efficiency of your team. Watch the recording, share it with your team If you’re evaluating the move to git and you want to get familiar with distributed version control concepts, then this webinar will help you get started. And for those who are interested in the slides: Questions from the webinar…answered As testament to how big a topic git is and the need for this kind of training material, more than a hundred questions were asked by our audience during the webinar. Many were worth answering, but we thought we’d answer some here so everyone could benefit. Here we go! Q: What’s the difference between using a centralized server in git vs subversion ? The difference is huge and comes down to the new capabilities and concepts inherent with distributed version control. Let me name a few things that you gain by using git even if you stick with a centralized collaboration model: Even if you have a central server, every git clone has access to the entire history of the project locally. This is a great boost of productivity for every developer in general. All operations but push and pull are local. This means the speed of operations like searching for commits, content inside commits, committing changes is incredibly fast, almost instant for most codebases. git gives you very powerful branching capabilities: creating a branch is instant, merges happen locally and are very fast too. Merges in git have also the added benefit to generate less conflicts because they are first class citizens of the architecture and git knows about ancestry relation between branches. git allows for a very powerful way of developing software: feature branch development workflow. Using git and a repository management solution like Stash or Bitbucket, opens up a new low friction code review and quality process popularly known as Pull Request. The Pull Request is an innovation that came with git. Q: Are push and pull similar to commit and update in Subversion ? Yes, that’s correct at a high level! But there are obviously differences. To clarify: A git push is indeed similar to a svn commit, but keep in mind a few things: A git commit is a local operation. When you perform a push you will upload all the commits that the remote repository does not have yet, not necessarily a single commit. With git you can push code to any remote branch you like while in Subversion your checked out branch and the server one will always match. In git, a pull is equivalent to firing two separate commands: A fetch where the latest changes from the remote repository are stored in the the local repository (not the working directory). A merge of those incoming changes to the branch checked out at that moment. Q: How can you use git to manage code reviews while using a centralized model? […]
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