Git

Basic Git usage

Getting VLC source code via Git

git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git

You can also browse the sources via gitweb.

Configure your local git repository

Tell git your name. (used by mostly by git-commit)

$ git repo-config user.name "Your Name"
$ git repo-config user.email "me@example.com"

List the local branch

You can now list your local branch by doing

$ git branch

which should ouput

$ git branch
* master

Commit

Now you can start to work on your tree. As soon as you feel you've reached a step in developement you can commit locally your work by

$ git commit -a

or

$ git commit <specific files>

List your commits

$ git log

Keeping your local working branch in sync

$ git fetch origin
$ git rebase origin

voilà! Your commit will be re-applied on top of the origin (the svn trunk).

Submitting patches to the vlc-devel

If you have been developing on vlc locally and (still) don't have write access, you can submit all your commit in one shot using:

$ git format-patch -o out origin

which will produce the patches for each local commit in the directory "out". You can also use the git-imap-send command:

$ git format-patch --stdout --attach -n origin | git-imap-send

which will directly produces the emails and store them in a imap mail box, provided that you have properly set up git-imap-send.

Advanced usage

Creating a secondary local branch

If you want to work on a specific project that could require a branch of the trunk, create a local branch of the current branch by doing:

$ git branch mywork

and to actually use it do:

$ git checkout mywork

Then do some commit on it... And you can go back to your original master branch by doing:

$ git checkout master

Revert your non-committed local changes

$ git checkout -f

Undo commit

This will undo the last commit

$ git reset HEAD^

which is the same as

$ git reset master^

(if you are checked-out copy of your tree is master) And also the same as

$ git reset a44a594 # note that there is no need to use the full sha id

if you have:

$ git log
commit ff7004b70fd239e4120deb160e2991bd5237b8df
Author: fkuehne <fkuehne>
Date:   Thu Apr 12 18:44:47 2007 +0000
    * added sanity flags for future darwin releases and potentionally fixed OSX 
commit a44a594898f981a145cfcace5f16f8973f9eb46f
Author: jb <jb>
Date:   Thu Apr 12 16:24:49 2007 +0000
    Qt4 - MouseWheel support - patch by Sergey Volk.

Tracking regression

git has a great tool called git-bisect to help you to track a faulty commit. Imagine you are tracking a bug that is known to appear after v0.8.6 (assuming v0.8.6 is tagged):

$ git bisect start
$ git bisect bad # tell git current version has the bug you are tracking
$ git bisect good v0.8.6 # tell git v0.8.6 didn't has the bug

And then git will checkout a certain revision, and ask you to test it. And you simply say whether this version has the bug. If it has the bug:

$ git bisect bad

if the bug is not present:

$ git bisect good

And so on by bisection... At the end git will indicate the faulty commit. Most of the time this tool is really efficient to track regression.

Documentation about git

• Official Git Website
• Git Tutorial
• Switching from SVN to git using cogito