Git, Showoff, XBox Kinect

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:

• Scott Chacon – GitHub, X
• Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
• Kenneth Reitz – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• 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!