I've been trying really hard (with success!) to get Git (the revision control system from Linus) to work the way I like it.
So the first thing I tried was to clone a remote repository from git hub. That was pretty easy. git clone URL and the repo was cloned. Piece of cake.
Next thing (since I like to mess around) was to create a repo from scratch. No surprise here - git init folder_name and I was done. Working with the new repo did show some surprises... First, the git add required me to specify something to work with. With Mercurial or Bazaar this was not the case so I was surprised to see an error message but I figured out it pretty quickly.
Next thing - commit.
Well, if you worked with Subversion, Mercurial and Bazaar you'd be pretty used to the "ci" abbreviation. Unfortunately it's not working in Git and you have to specify the whole command name... Same thing goes for "status".
Using TortoiseGit under Windows didn't bring much surprise - it was as I'd be using Subversion which means plain and simple.
Last but not least came the problem of sharing my work and creating a "central" (the most important) repository. Had I known this would be so f..ing difficult I'd not start with it at all...
First, there's a "git-daemon" thingy that should take care of the "server" part. Well, it does and exporting (making publicly available) a repository was not a nightmare. One needs to remember that a repo is not automatically available via this daemon but first after creating a tag file in .git subdirectory called "git-daemon-export-ok". That was not intuitive but I can live with it. Google did help.
My anger started when I wanted to push something to the newly cloned and modified repo. It turns out it's not that simple because the "git-daemon" thingy is supposed to be read-only!
After hours of fighting with stupid error messages that the connection was suddenly dropped... Very counterintuitive! But I thought it's not the end of the world and looked further.
I've finally stumbled upon a post describing that git is actually allows interoperability using SSH protocol. So I've cloned the repo using different url (username@host:/path), done the same changes again, checked them in and tried to push. Well... It didn't work either. The repo had to be marked as "bare" - whatever that means. If you've come across this term anywhere else please drop me a note - I have no fricken idea what it means.
So I've "marked" the repo as "bare" in the config file. And again I was not able to push any changes because the repo was empty (surprise! an empty repo cannot be served!!!). After doing some foobar changes to it and committing them on the server I was finally able to push my local changes.
It all sounds like a piece of cake once you know what to do, but attacking the problem head on for the first time is simply a pain in the ass to figure it out.
To summarize:
- you cannot server r/w repo using git protocol. You need to use SSH or other protocol that supports authentication.
- you have to have at least one checkin in the server version of the repository before you're able to push chages from remote clients.
- you need to create "git-daemon-export-ok" for the repo to be picked up by "git-daemon" or else!
- you need to set the "bare" config option to "true" or else!
I hope this will help someone. Have fun!
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