Get started with Git

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Article from Issue 286/2024
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Git comes up all the time in discussions of Linux, but in our new world of repositories and package managers, many users are still unfamiliar with it. Read on to get started with this powerful version control environment.

Code and version management used to be difficult and risky. Users were never quite sure whether they would keep or lose their last changes when switching to a different development branch. Attempts to merge the results of hours of work could sometimes lead to unexpected results.

Before Git [1] became the de facto standard, CVS [2] was the most widely used version management system. In CVS, all changes must be uploaded to a central server and the user needs a functioning network connection. In addition, CVS only saves the individual changes and never a complete version of the code. When merging the work of two developers, branching can lead to conflict situations that can be very time consuming to resolve. Other systems such as Subversion (svn) [3] or Mercurial (hg) [4] brought about significant improvements, but at the end of the day, Git worked best and is the most widely accepted option.

Git offers a revolutionary, decentralized approach: mirroring the entire repository, including the complete history of all files, on the computers of all users. At the same time, Git always creates complete snapshots of the entire repository.

[...]

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