Suggestions please for a home version control system

Question

I have a home project that really needs to be in Source Control. I tried installing Subversion, which I have some experience with, but couldn\'t get it working. I don\'t parti

Answer 1

Don't be scared of by git. It has gotten far easier to use than it used to be!

It fits all your requirements (open source/free/run on Win32/have a GUI, which is included), and there are lots of good resources available.

As a really basic guide, using the command line (the "Git GUI" should be pretty self explanatory):

1. mkdir myrepo - make a new directory, this could be an existing dir with your code in it
   • git init - makes the directory into a git repository. this basically adds a .git/ folder to the current directory. This is like using VisualSVN, creating a new repository then checking it out to a working directory (just without the server
   • vim myfile.txt - make a new file, if you have existing files, you obviously can skip this
   • git add myfile.txt - start tracking the new file (similar to svn add'ing a file)
   • git commit - commits whatever you have run git add on.

..and that's it. You have a version tracked file! When you change the file, you do git add myfile.txt again to "stage" the changes, then commit to add all the staged files into a commit.

It's slightly different to how SVN works. With SVN, you commit a file, and it gets sent to the server. With git, you stage a file (or multiple files, or even bits of a file, which is very useful), then commit them.

You can do all of the above easily (including creating repositories, staging specific lines in a file) in Git GUI.

On Windows, install msysgit.

Then, if you don't mind spending $9, watch the Peepcode GIT episode for a comprehensive overview of what git is, how it works, and how to use it.

Alternatively, GitCasts are also a very good (free) set of screencasts, which cover most of the basic stuff. Watch the ones you think would be useful to you, I would recommend watching the setting up, then normal workflow, then GIT on windows

Finally, GIT Magic is a great guide to doing everything with git. I use it a lot, despite having used git a lot over the last year or so (it's useful for answering "how do I..." things you forget. Say "how do I recover a lost commit", "how do I reset the repository to 4 revisions back")

I would also recommend playing around with GitHub. It's a very nice to use git-hosting site. When you create a new repository, it gives you the list of commands to make a new repository, and push your changes to to github (something I didn't really cover - the distributed workflow gitcasts, the peepcode episode and git magic all cover this really well)