The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings").

Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched, and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again. I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between:

The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives.
The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion.
StackOverflow questions tagged git, these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questions people are asking right now. And I reckon people are also a bit afraid of asking too stupid questions here, because of the ranking system.

Then there's the joy of using (the new) Google Groups. It's easy to join (if you've got a Google account). Spam is virtually eliminated. The mobile version works pretty well on my phone. Search is great and it all looks pretty good (actually today they announced another bunch of improvements). Big hand to the Google Groups team, this stuff is awesome (now Google would just have to make something IRC-like, and we'd be well off).

My favorite thing about helping out on the Git-user list (well, apart from that fuzzy warm feeling when someone says thanks) is that it keeps my Git basics sharp. Any time a colleague asks me how to set a new upstream, or rebase one branch onto another, chances are I was just practicing that recently for the mailing list. Keep in mind that if the Go-to-guy for Git questions in the team doesn't know her/his basics, people will get annoyed at Git rather quickly.

Of course there are occasionally more challenging questions, and I end up learning something from somebody else on the list. And then in a few cases, we just have to give up and bounce people over to the Git development list (usually for feature requests and bug reports).

I like to think that we are doing the Git community a big service by elevating the average Git knowledge in the field, and also shielding the development list from some of the more repeating questions.

So here's the little sales-pitch in the end: The list has gotten rather busy lately, so if you've got some Git-foo to spare, it would be great if you could answer a couple of threads. Personally I make it an evening routine to drop by groups.google.com, and see if there are any unread or unanswered threads there.

Comments

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git -> ~/.mrconfig -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git -> ~/.vimrc -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git -> ~/bin/* config-git.git -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git -> ~/.tmux.conf config-zsh.git -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o