Thinking of trying Git on Windows - anyone can share their experiences (+/- ve both) ?

what a journey - a bit like going out for a pint of milk and ending up circumnavigating the coast of ireland!! here is what I posted on my blog (siliconmouth.wordpress.com) a few days after initial posting (27/12/08)

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The hunt for an SCM tool - leads to GIT !
December 27, 2008
So there I was on Christmas Eve hacking away at a websites code, having made an edit to about the 50th file over a three month period.

Not for the first time it occured to me that I needed some sort of software configuration support - indeed previously Id read the very good SCM comparison on wikipedia (for some research on a recruitment project as it happens) and was surprised to see so many freeware/shareware/open source solutions had entered the market in the ten years or so since Id last used one!

Id made a mental note to go back to that list when I had some time so I guess that by Christmas Eve a combination of the stress of managing source code by hand must have reached critical mass, and that, combined with it being holiday time, gave me justification to commit the half-day or so I hoped it would take to pick out and install a decent solution.

Git seemed to score well and the more I read about it the more excited I became, especially when I read the history - conceived by one Linus Thorvald (thats right - the inventor of Linux) to support the open source teams working on the latest versions of the Linux kernel. This stuff was coming with a fine pedigree.

There seemed to be a windows port also, and although fairly new, had become mature enough to win over a few friends for itself in the blogosphere so with their help I sat down and installed Git.

The installation was a dream, which is very rare for open source stuff, ESPECIALLY on Windows, however when I sat down to go through the tutorial and the user guide thats when the fun started.

The tutorials were more aimed at either open source developers looking to hook into big open source projects to contribute (test and/or develope) where the projects were already well defined, or linux/c/shell heads.

The half-day got stretched and stretched, all the time it seemed I was just round the corner from enlightenment, so I kept plugging away. Plus I was desperate to get it dealt with quickly as I didnt want to be sidetracked from the other project (itself a sidetrack) too long. All of which contributed to put me in a GIT-induced frenzy over the Christmas period. My partner, kids, parents, siblings etc. barely got a look in as I nerded away in an upstairs or faraway room somewhere. In my more lucid moments I questioned my own sanity, and in my less lucid moments I wondered if  someone had made the whole thing up as a wind-up to catch out non-hackers who wanted something for nothing.

I finally found an active forum on Git, in fact it was the definitive forum on Git, run by Junio Hamann, the guy Linus had put in charge of developing Git after hed got the initial prototype of the ground. These guys were serious unix kernel guys and open source gurus but I was desperate to get somewhere (who knows what that feels like - hands up !) so I posted my feeble little newbie question on there just after midnight on Christmas day (or should I say Boxing Day) and switched back to the user manual.

Imagine my shock and surprise when none other than the legend himself Junio Hamano responded half an hour later! He gave me some great pointers, and over the next 24hour period with his and others help I finally got my head around how to do our basic workflow using Git.

As its quite complex, no sooner had I done it my little workflow mock up, than I did it again (taking my cue from Einstein, who used to derive relativity repeatedly) and then again, and then typed it all up, as the stuff is complex enough that if you didnt use it for a while youd be back close to square one.

Im going to publish it now on this blog as Im sure Im not the only one who has / will come up against this.

the work continued, not as smoothly as I'd have hoped. I posted this on my blog the day before your posting spdr870:

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Taming the wild mustang that is GIT
December 30, 2008
Believe it or not, I had budgeted half a day for getting git installed, learned, and all the versions safely stowed away.
That was on Xmas eve (24th Dec.)
 
Ive been on this every day since - gawd, its becoming an Odyssey.
 
SCM is a support to my software development, which is a support to my business (a user business, not technology based) and in a normal year (not like this current one) software dev would be <10% of our effort. I can sense the beauty of git, but A WEEK ! to get close to making the first LIVE COMMIT.
 
Im going to assert that a large number of possible users will not be interested, or how shall I put it better, theyl be very interested in git, but thats where it will stay. The blogosphere is littered with the burnt bodies of those who have tried to ride this dragon. Gawd its tempting to give up and install CVS, Mercurial or something, the only thing keeping me going is that I HATE quitting !
 
What is it about this stuff ? I am not unintelligent but struggling with this.
 
It seems like to do something simple you have to understand EVERYTHING -
its not like other systems with a clear set of basic, intermediate and advanced commands that are fairly standalone.
 
everything in git seems so interleaved - its like relativity, or nuclear physics !
Im sure git nirvana is coming sometime for me,
gawd please may it be in this lifetime!
 :-)

on 31/12 in a posting on the git list I said:
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"Hi Sitaram,

Yes the post arrived thanks !

I've done more C++ than C, but pointers etc. I can dig, malloc not, but its just a memory allocation like new, so ok.

The concept of a linked list I could get, just the implementation was unfamiliar (as I dont have a compsci bacround) but I guess I wanted to try and understand the implementation in C before responding to you.

But the concept helped me get commits in a unidirectional chain. So thnks.

However I am disillusioned with git - after nearly a week solid I find it can't do something simple that I take for granted in every other SCM I've ever used, and that is to be able to navigate to a prev version and get a clean exact copy of the filesystem of that project copied out into a directory.

You guys don't need to do that sort of thing v. often so its not a key function, so fair enuff.

I am installing mercurial right now, will trial that.

Thanks for all your help.

I won't say goodbye for ever in cse I'm back here in a few days !
For now,
Ciao!

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After looking at the documentation for mercurial for 5 mins I could see the exact command I needed to achieve my simple test:

> hg update -r<version#>

for what its worth I finally worked out what the corresponding command should be for git:

$ git checkout <version> .
$ git checkout <versoin>

or reverse the order, doesn't matter.
One checks out the version but takes into the accout whats in the index, the other cleans the index (from what I can remember). Heigh ho, all academic now.

I'm sorry to any git-advocates if my test my seem trite and not practical, but its what I use to test SCMs. Its like a panic button - if everyting is going crazy, can I get back to solid ground with one simple action? Git fails, Hg (mercury) succeeds. Ok, a tiny bit slower, but still a proper DVCS. I'm stil sore about that wasted holiday period when I could 'a got mercury in 5mins, oh well.....

what I posted to a kind hearted git-advocate from the list who followed up with me a few days later on the 2nd Jan
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HIM> i hope your git stuff is still coming along nicely.  it's a beautiful tool, and i don't know where i'd be without version control.  i can relate to your troubles, including your linux ones when that guy sent you a bash script.  i was fed up myself 9 months ago with being confused, so i bought a linux laptop from dell, dove in, and never looked back.  oddly enough, i work for microsoft...

ME> Would love to have the time to look into linux, I'm probably halfway there as I used to write unix scripts about 15 years ago. At the end of the day, these days I run a small IT & technology recruitment agency, and rather than hire someone to do our tech work, I now make it a point of pride to do it myself. Apart from anything else, it gains the respect of the techhies and hirers we deal with. So tech is less than 25% of my annual work, hence its indulgent of me to spend time on stuff that doesn't directly support my business, especially times being tough. Plus I have a complex job on my hands sorting out these versions of our website. Our ex-webdeveloper made some unauhtorised accesses and hijacked a link where he put something up that was not good for our company, and I only just found out about it recently. I may need to be on top of the files in case we decide to take a lawsuit, and the very least for damage limitation and to develop security and close loopholes.

I have to admit that I have sidelined git, and now am on mercurial. I just got really cheesed off about 3 or 4 days ago, before I got "$ git checkout <version>" followed by "$ git checkout ." was what I needed. I saw in about 5 mins how to do what I needed in mercurial. Ok, its not as fast, but if git saved me even 30secs per transaction, I'd need to do 2000 of them this year to win back the week I've spent learning it (never gonna do that in 10 years, at my rate). Oh but git is a beautiful tool. I have to think of potential collaborators though, and learning curve.

Its a shame though, as I so wanted to be beautiful and clever, but I'm resigned now to being "stupid and ugly" (what Linus calles non-git users) - haha - but at least I can sleep at night now.