A True Life Git Story …
A week with zero WiFi in rural South Carolina turned me into a Git convert -- full branch, merge, and revert history with no connection required.
Recently I took a trip to South Carolina (which was a ton of fun). We ended up in a place which isn’t known for its high speed internet … and a WIFI signal could not be identified for nearly nearly 15 miles (I know because I had a WIFI detector enabled on my G1 when we drove around). I needed to do some development over the week, but this development was a major change to some software I was writing. I needed the ability to branch, merge, check-in, revert, etc _without_ being connected to the internet, because I knew it would be over a week before I’d re-connect. Without this ability I’d have to create manual copies of my files, perform manual diffs of the files and manually merge/revert … aka: shoot myself in the foot.
Luckily, I had GIT installed. If you don’t know what it is, click on the link on the left. GIT enabled me to create a repository of my current work, (I was working with SVN previously for the project) branch for a new large feature and make frequent check-in’s throughout my development. I was able to create two new versions of my product on separate branches, all while maintaining a version history with full revert capability (which I ended up using a few times).
Once I was connected back at home, I was able to submit a pull request up to a GitHub.com private repository and pull the branched changes up (that’s not all of the steps I did, but this is what the end result pretty much came down to).
From here on out, I’m pretty much sold on the features that GIT comes with OOB as it provided the ability to work remotely, completely disconnected with a full VCS at my fingertips (which I used extensively).
Mark me down as another GIT convert.
