Using the git DVCS with code-immersion
October 29, 2009by Ian McEwen (ihm08)
Note: This is totally unnecessary but potentially convenient in most situations. The only situation in which you really need to understand git is if you’d like to contribute code to the code-immersion package – which I’d love it if you did.
As you all probably know, code-immersion is hosted on a service called GitHub. This, contrary to potential expectations, is not simply a funny-sounding name for yet another web service. Rather, it’s a funny-sounding name with some level of reason for yet another web service. The name comes from the distributed version control system (DVCS) the site is rooted in, called git. If you haven’t done much work with programming, you may not know what a version control system is; essentially, it’s a place to keep all the code so that it’s convenient for any number of programmers to grab and play with, without breaking anything permanently. It keeps track of changes and history and makes it easy to get, play with, and update code.
You can read about git at its own site, or ask me about it (in comments or by email or in person); the point of this post is really to say that, should you be interested, code-immersion is hosted in a git repository; if you have git, you can get it (clone, in git terminology) from git://github.com/ianmcorvidae/code-immersion.git and play with it in the usual ways (other than pushing back to github – to do that, talk to me or read up on how github itself works!).