Understanding Git

For developers transitioning from a Centralized Version Control System (CVCS) such as SVN to a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) such as Git, the Pro Git book can be useful.  A free version of the book can be read on-line or downloaded.

Git and Eclipse

The latest version of Eclipse (indigo) comes with a URL for installing EGit.  The EGit eclipse plugin provides eclipse with git support.  A good place to start is the User's guild: http://wiki.eclipse.org/EGit/User_Guide.

The following guild is also useful for setting up your Git/Eclipse workflow: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Platform-releng/Git_Workflows.

If you are having problems getting Eclipse + Maven + EGit to work together, here is a post with various workarounds: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869815/importing-a-maven-project-into-eclipse-from-git.

Installing Git on Windows w/Cygwin

While Cygwin comes with a version of Git bundled, we had problems getting to work.  As a workaround we installed the latest version of Git for windows :http://git-scm.com/downloads, which fixed our issues.  The following instructions were used:

Download and run the Git for windows: Git http://git-scm.com/downloads and run the Git-<version>-preview<date>.exe

  1. choose a simple destination locations such as: C:\git-1.7.10
  2. "How would you like to run Git from the command line?"
    1. We choose this option since Cygwin already had an old version of Git installed.
  3. "Which Secure Shell client woud you like git to use?"
    1. We chose "Use OpenSSH"
  4. "How would you like git to treat line ending?"
    1. We selected "Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style line endings"

Once you have Git installed, you will need to setup the PATH

First add an environment variable:

 GIT_HOME=C:\git-1.7.10 (use the same path you set in the first step of the installer)

Next append this to your PATH

;%GIT_HOME%/bin

Start Cygiwn

Determine where the old version of git is currently running from:

$ which git
/usr/bin/git

Since this old version of Git was not working we simply renamed it:

mv /usr/bin/git /usr/bin/git-old

After restarting Cygwin the new version of git was being used:

$ which git
/cygdrive/c/git-1.7.10/bin/git
$ git --version
git version 1.7.10.msysgit.1