James Gregory

Just a reminder that tonight I’ll be doing an E-VAN on Git tonight at 7pm GMT.

It’s going to be a pretty basic talk on what Git is (and indirectly what DVCS is), and a demo on how to use most of the features you’ll need daily. There might be some advanced talk at the end, depending on how well I time things.

Here’s a few ways to think about Git and it’s distributed nature.

• You deal with multiples of repositories, not a single central repository
• Updates come from a remote repository, and changes are pushed to a remote; none of these repositories have to be the same
• Origin is the canonical name for the repository you cloned from
• Upstream is the canonical name for the original project repository you forked from

MSpec is awesome, I think it’s praised by myself and others enough for that particular point to not need any expansion; however, there is a particular feature I would like to highlight that hasn’t really got a lot of press: behaviours.

Behaviours define reusable specs that encapsulate a particular set of, you guessed it, behaviours; you’re then able to include these specs in any context that exhibits a particular behaviour.

Here we go again, explaining the internals of Git with the intention of helping you understand what you’re doing day-to-day. Last time I covered branches, HEAD, and fast-forwarding. Today we’ll dive into the guts of merging and rebasing.

Lets get some learning done. There are a few questions that keep cropping up when I introduce people to Git, so I thought I’d post some answers as a mini-series of blog posts. I’ll cover some fundamentals, while trying not to retread too much ground that the fantastic Git community book already covers so well. Instead I’m going to talk about things that should help you understand what you and Git are doing day-to-day.