One of the things that I’m passionate about is the development process. So much of the battle is won or lost by the type of development process you have. Leaning on a couple smart guys, I’ve established a very clean workflow in git. If you haven’t read these posts, please do so before continuing. Both are excellent and will help clarify my question.

I finally did it. I took notes as I built a server and am posting it (mainly so I don’t forget). In case someone wants to print this, I left most of the URLs in text so you’d be able to read them. So here it goes.

Recently, I have been exploring Refinery, a relatively new Rails-based CMS. So far I’ve been very impressed. One of the sites I been implementing in Refinery will be deployed to Heroku which has some constraints which cause the out-of-the-box version of Refinery to fail. Here’s how to get it working if you’re interested.

Subversion (SVN) has been a staple of my development process since I ran kicking and screaming out of the Visual SourceSafe (VSS) dungeon many years old. It has served me very well. I used the basic edit-commit-merge life-cycle and all was good. Here’s the strange thing.

I’ve been trying to find a simple way to find out the commit differences in two git branches for while now. I resorted to using git show-branch which works pretty well, but can get cumbersome when you have a lot of branches. I just discovered git cherry is just want I’ve been looking for.

I am using git for all new projects. For the active ones that are still on subversion I’m using git-svn. It is true– git-svn is a gateway drug. While git provides a number of advantages over subversion, there are a number of hurdles to overcome if you decide to switch.

I’ve very comfortable using Subversion for version control. Why switch to git, the new DVCS darling?