Git. Soon, you’ll be using it, too. The definition of “soon” probably varies widely depending on what kind of person you are. But, no better time than now to start getting acquainted with the idea.
- If you’re currently a Subversion user, and who isn’t, then try the Git tutorial for Subversion users.
- There’s a Peepcode screencast on using Git.
- Git is pretty deeply hacker stuff and the default
gitkUI is uglier than sin. However, Chris Wanswrath and Tom Preston-Werner are adding some beauty to the equation with github.
Finally, what I really wanted to do here was publicly commend Dr. Nic Williams for his adept use at Star Wars metaphor and humanization of Grand Moff Tarkin in his post on using Git to manage the new Rails TextMate bundle. Well done, sir. I owe you a frosty one.
Adam Keys is typing 
Well, yeah I guess it could help for me to mention its a source control system. But that just takes all the obscurity out of it. And what fun is it without a little bit of obscurity?!
Being pessimistic, it seems this wouldn’t be as conducive for continuous integration. I can hang on to my commits in my personal repo for longer, before deciding to push this to the public repo (or whatever) … and is that how I’d setup a build server? for it to work from a ‘public repo’ or a build machine repo?
How do backups work? If I have the flexibility to work in my own repo and mix and match with other personal repos of devs around me – then each of us is now responsible for backing up our repo (or we make sure and push to the build repo for backups?)
Does the distributed nature of the tool mean I could get away with cheap distributed source control via email (presuming my company had too many issues to allow easy networked access to distributed repos) — or is doing patches via email a bit more work than its worth for anything other than patches?
[I meant to check the “Send me an email when anyone comments” checkbox, but the tab order for this form jumped from the comment box to the Submit button – so my “Tab – Spacebar” keystroke sequence resulted in a premature submit, rather than checking the box, requiring me to comment again – which in THIS case is ok because I felt like ranting about your commented tab order — but I rant only because I care so much. Love, me).