One of the things everybody points out about git is that it’s a fairly complex system. Of course, other version control systems like Subversion are complex as well, but git doesn’t seem to do as much as the others insulate you (the user) from what’s going on “under the hood.” Case in point: the difference between merging and rebasing.

Merging was a simple enough idea (not) to get used to when I was using Subversion. Basically the idea is this: you have your copy of the versioned material (in Subversion: the working copy), and somewhere else there’s a remote copy of the material (in Subversion: the repository). When both your local copy and the remote copy have been modified since they were last synced up, you have two sets of changes to the same data: your local changes and the remote changes. If you’re going to sync your copy to the remote copy again, you need to combine those two sets of changes. The way Subversion does it for you is a two-step process (which in Subversion terminology is called “updating”):

1. Compute what (remote) changes were made to the remote copy since you last synced …

I’ve been watching git with interest for a while now, because the concept of a distributed version control system — one where you don’t need to contact a central server to make a record of your recent changes — would go pretty well with a lot of the things I use version control for. (Not just source code, but managing homework and papers that I type up in LaTeX) I’ve been stuck on Subversion for a while, mostly because I have a nifty GUI for Subversion for which no worthy equivalent exists for Git, but lately I realize I’ve been using the standard command-line client most of the time. So why not take the opportunity to switch over to git? (Plus, I wanted to get a nifty new toy to play with ;-)

One thing about git which took a couple days to really figure out is the idea of having a repository in every working copy. They say this in all the documentation but somehow I never quite got it until trying it, so I’ll repeat: a git working copy is like an SVN working copy with its own built-in, private repository. In SVN, when you commit …