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Jeff Squyres edited this page Sep 10, 2014 · 9 revisions

For a nice, relatively brief overview of Git's basic usage, please see the Pro Git book by Scott Chacon, available for free online. If you want to understand the nitty-gritty, check out Git From the Bottom Up.

Otherwise, here are a list of typical "dos" and "don'ts" for Git, some with a specific eye towards Open MPI:

Do

  • make smaller, logically self-contained commits
  • write nice commit messages, with a concise subject line and a useful description of what change is being made and why
  • If you think you screwed up a repository (yours or a shared one), STOP.
  • run git gc on your repository periodically, it will speed up many operations and shrink the space consumed on disk by your .git directory

Don't

  • change published history
  • change published history!
  • CHANGE PUBLISHED HISTORY!!
  • delete or rename published tags, this is a real pain to unwind
  • make large rambling commits that intermix multiple unrelated changes
  • make unnecessary whitespace changes in the same commit where you are changing logic
  • commit any large binaries to the repository, this will rapidly increase the storage space required for everybody's clones
  • use git filter-branch unless you really know what you are doing, and especially don't use it on published history
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