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

• Wynn Netherland – Twitter, GitHub
• Kenneth Reitz – Twitter, GitHub

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.