Re: What's the best way to make my company migrate to Git?

From: Daniele Segato <daniele.bilug@gmail.com>
Date: May 22, 2010, 15:52 UTC
Message-ID: <1274543552.21346.166.camel@Luffy>
In-Reply-To: <4BF7B751.7050704@pileofstuff.org>

Il giorno sab, 22/05/2010 alle 11.52 +0100, Andrew Sayers ha scritto:

> Hi Daniele,
> 
> I'm a developer getting towards the end of introducing my company to 
> Git.  Here are some thoughts based on the (mis)steps I took.

thanks

Show 12 quoted lines

> I found that advocating specific steps wasn't that effective - I just 
> came across as being pushy and hard to work with.  It was more effective 
> to politely show off what I could do with git-svn, and let people get 
> jealous enough to work the "how" out for themselves.  Here are some 
> examples:
> 
> I would quietly bisect a hard-to-fix bug, then .... [big-snip]
> 
> Over the course of a few months, people became convinced that Git was 
> something that makes you more productive.  Our lead developer had a go 
> with git-svn for a while, before our boss decided we should all make the 
> switch.

I'm already doing this stuff.. but i'm in the *lead developer* position now, so, if I say that they had to start using git (at least my team) they will..

But I don't thing going throw git-svn is a good idea.. it has some limitation over the normal git and you have to be more careful about rebasing (interactive) and you should avoid merge (as much as I understood it).

I'd like to make the big move going directly to git. I don't think i'll had the time to do it now, the new project is already going on.. but I'd like to have all prepared and ready for the next one :)

> I tried to make git-svn as painless as possible with some svn-like 
> aliases and a cheatsheet, which I'd be happy to upload if the list could 
> suggest a good place to put a PDF and some text.

I think that may be useful to many. In my specific case it wouldn't help, since everybody is used to click around with the git-svn graphical interface, they don't even know the svn commands to do those stuffs. They are almost all windows-minded :) you know: "writing when you can click? why?" - I use to think the opposite :)

What i mean here is: git should be graphical, at least at the beginning, better if inside eclipse itself.

Show 6 quoted lines

> The move worked for a while, but it turned out that one-and-a-half git 
> experts supporting the rest of the team wasn't enough to stop people 
> from making rookie mistakes like `git merge`ing into an SVN branch with 
> unpushed changes.  We had to accelerate our move to git on the server, 
> and I got a lot of exercise and not much work done that month as I 
> dashed from desk to desk.

that's what I fear, because we usually are overladen of work and we can't stand some slow down if it last more then 2-3 days in a row. If that happen I'll be the one who will be blamed for the issue :)

> Things gradually calmed down as people got more comfortable with git. 
> But I expect to be occasionally called over for a long time as people 
> learn new tricks - "how do I, like, cherry-unpick a single commit?"

Well.. that's ok.. the problem is with things I don't know about git like: what's the best way to manage binary files? how do I manage submodules? and so on... if I don't know how to properly reply to those questions I'll obtain the opposite effect :)

Thanks for your experience,

Daniele