Re: [boost] [Git] Documentation update

Subject: Re: [boost] [Git] Documentation update
From: Klaim - Joël Lamotte (mjklaim_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-02-12 20:40:55

Sorry I posted before finishing writing, here is the complete email.

Here is my experience on this.
I am a user of git who retrieve libraries and sometime patch them and
provide PR on GitHub and Bitbucket,
but I don't fully use git as I find Mercurial far more clear on the command
line interface (and TortoiseHg helps a lot too
but I suspect a future Windows release of SourceTree will change things
radically).

First I must say that git itself on windows is less obscure than it was few
years ago. Still, errors are very
obscure compared to mercurial on windows, but this is another discussion.

Currently, I have 3 tools that help using git:

 - TortoiseGit (+MSysGit) : it install everything but git so you have to
install MSysGit first (which is not very intuitive at first because you
always ask "why not install it for me?").
    Once done the GUI is pretty much inspired from TortoiseSVN. It's ugly
(never correctly sized windows and fields) but works correctly so far.
 - GitGUI: easy to install but incredibly intrusive in interfaces and also
have a very obscure UI (I find)  I don't recommand it.
 - GitHub (the app): clean and simple. It's excellent working with GitHub
but it becomes quickly too simple when you want to do some advanced
manipulations.
    The display is really nice but I don't like not being able to sort
easily the changes I want to commit.

In all these tools you can invoke the command line with git available
inside a repository directory so you can always easily work with command
line.

My thinking is that if you want to work with GitHub.com only, then GitHub
is your best choice BUT you should learn the git command line syntax fully
in case you need to do
advanced stuffs.
However if you want to work with other support systems, use TortoiseGit.

Notice that TortoiseGit have nothing like TortoiseHg's Workbench which is
too bad, but as I said I hope a coming Windows version of SourceTree will
eliminate
the GUI problem for SVN, GIT and HG repositories.

So yeah, git on windows is getting easier, it's just a bit slow to get easy
to use.

Joel Lamotte