Git, Showoff, XBox Kinect (The Changelog #49)

Kenneth and Wynn caught up with GitHubber Scott Chacon to talk about Git, distributed version control, and his quest to kill Word as a book authoring tool.

Kenneth and Wynn caught up with GitHubber Scott Chacon to talk about Git, distributed version control, and his quest to kill Word as a book authoring tool.

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Featuring

Notes and Links

Scott Chacon, Git evangelist, GitHubber, author of ProGit
rsync is a software application for Unix and Windows systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate.
Perforce is a commercial, proprietary, centralized revision control system developed by Perforce Software, Inc.
Git Internals, Scott’s PeepCode PDF
Chris, Tom, PJ, founders of GitHub
Continuous integration is one of Git’s strengths
Surprisingly, Scott’s .gitconfig isn’t pimped out
gitk The git GUI repository browser
gitx Git GUI for OS X
gitgui Unlike gitk, git gui focuses on commit generation and single file annotation and does not show project history.
Why Git and not Mercurial?
Mercurial bookmarks are references to commits that are automatically updated when new commits are made. If you do hg bookmark feature the feature bookmark refers to the current changeset.
hg-git is the Hg-Git plugin for Mercurial, adding the ability to push to and pull from a Git server repository from Mercurial.
BitBucket is to Hg as GitHub is to Git
Scott says he had good intentions in comparing Git to other version control systems and was not lobbing stones at Mercurial
Scott says distributed source control systems are key to helping the open source community thrive because it lets anyone commit and get involved
The RubyGems.org 404 is amusing
libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library with a solid API, allowing you to write native speed custom Git applications in any language which supports C bindings.
GitHub has continued the libgit2 Google Summer of Code effort, supporting Vicent Marti to continue the development
Scott says that Git is basically a key value store and we should look at uses beyond version control
Eclipse is moving to Git away from CVS
Git Tower is a beautiful Git UI for the Mac
Showoff is a Sinatra web app that reads simple configuration files for a presentation. It is sort of like a Keynote web app engine.
Kinectaby, Ruby bindings for XBox Kinect
Wynn is excited about Scott’s project Git Scribe for writing, feeling the pain of using Word for archaic book publisher workflows
Jason J Williams’s tools have lessened the pain for Wynn in writing the upcoming Sass book for Manning
Everybody that works at GitHub is Scott’s programming hero but Ryan Tomayko is one of the smartest developer’s Scott knows.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!