Git, the oft-referred to as “Linux, Rubyists, and Cool Kids source code control system”, is gaining ground so fast that there’s not enough room in this post to mention all the traction and good press it is achieving. Yet, a common comment I hear over lunches and cubicle walls is
“Git doesn’t have good support on Windows yet.“
I politely disagree.
While the methods for putting Git on Windows have a slight variance from that of putting it on Mac or Linux, I have seen no real compatibility issues in my near daily use of it on all three aforementioned platforms. Is there still room for it to get better on Windows though? Definitely!
The next lament I hear is
“If only there were a Tortise-like UI for Git.“
Let me also put that to rest and direct you to the TortiseGit homepage. While TortiseGit is still a work in progress, I’ve seen a handful of folks already putting it to productive daily use. And if you don’t like TortiseGit, then try GitSafe. And if you are using IntelliJ, support is built right into v8.1, Eclipse has eGit as an official Eclipse project now, and NetBeans has an issue open and some ongoing work for support which, awesomely consumes parts of eGit (JGit Libs) from Eclipse.
And just to share the “Peanutbutter in my Chocolate” favorite story of the week, Maven is moving to Git in many directions at once:
- I asked Jukka Zitting of Apache to mirror the Maven SVN trunks to Git. 36 hours later, it was done. What an amazing team player Jukka is.
- Maven: The Definitive Guide has moved its canonical repository to GitHub. Fork, contribute, and issue pull requests to Sonatype at will!
- Jason van Zyl, the founder of Maven, has sent out an inquiry to the Maven Dev mailing list musing about moving Maven’s official source repo to Git.
If you have yet to explore or fully leverage the power of Git or Maven, now is a critical juncture of market acceptance for these tools, and accordingly, a perfect time to explore their benefits. For the latest news on Git, Maven, iPhone development, and Open Source, join the conversation over at Twitter.