A HOWTO on GIT patch management software that replaces Bitkeeper has been published on the Linux Kernel mailing list.
GIT HOWTO for the Linux Kernel
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
this looks complicated. is there any frontend to make git easier to use?
Well git is but a few weeks old, so I wasn’t expecting easy setup scripts and admin tools, much less a GUI front end. I’m sure the process will become simpler in time.
Cogito is a version control system layered on top of the git tree history storage system.
Cogito can be obtained as a tarball from
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/cogito/
The complete cogito documentation can be found here:
http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/
Cogito is the user-friendly SCM wrapper around the GIT filesystem.
gitweb, in all its glory, is at
http://www.kernel.org/git
It’s quite amazing how much is there already, considering that git/cogito is just a few weeks old.
Another useful git tool:
http://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk-1.0
Check this fine journalism out:
http://forbes.com/business/2005/05/25/cz_dl_0525linux.html
So BitMover’s CEO gives BK to the Linux kernel project, presumably because the new SCM needs testing and a high profile success story. Linux uses it because it is truly a nice system, although it has tons of extra features that the kernel developers and Linus do not need. This guy wants to collect half a million dollars for support, and he complains that Linus said no way. This is not a case of Linus/developers not wanting to pay for anything, as he implies, but rather that the amount of restitution suggested was way out of the league of OSDL or private donations. The kernel project was using such a nifty tool because it was free, not because they needed any bells and whistles.
However long GIT takes to develop is well worth it. The kernel is at a point of relative maturity now, and the devs need to lay down a stable, long-term system for maintaining it. As we see, the progress is quick. The abandonment of BK caused about a month of delay on 2.6.12, and shouldn’t have any measurable impact on future releases. It did cause the beginning of the end for BitMover, though, so this guy does have a reason to grudge against Linus. He needed the Linux kernel project to keep his company in the spotlight. Now all he can do is claim that development will slow and that someone will infect the kernel with malicious code.
Linus said immediately following the decision that the SCM tool affects himself more than all the developers. If GIT makes Linus happy, it is good for the project.