13/07/2010 Git success story in parallel development

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The time pass but my enthusiasm for Git continues to glow! Actually, it seams that I am not the only one to enjoy Git as surprisingly my last article on Git became the most read post (if I can rely on my website statistic...) before a lot of OpenGL articles as it can be expected.

One great tool with Git is Gitk. I was using it on the OpenGL Samples Pack and suddenly I was amazed by the graph Gitk gave me: A demonstration of the effectiveness of a development process based on Git! With Git, it's so easy to work on different things, on different version... in parallel!

The yellow labels are tags that I use as releases markers and the green labels are branches. Enjoy the branches communications.

With the OpenGL Samples Pack the graph is quite complex relatively to the project size. However, it's just what I need and this is where it's a success story. G-Truc Creation website development is also based on Git but the graph is much simpler (quite boring one actually) graph but it's still just what I need.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Git allows a flexible way to develop a project where features doesn't need to be locked into #define but are instead manage by the Version Control System... just like it should be! Git makes easy and nice the process of building the feature list of a release using a version branch and several feature branches. If a feature isn't finish for the release, it's easy to delay it to a future release and if the development of a feature fail or get cancelled, it's easy to discard it without polluting the code. A whole strategy to build better software but also, I insist on the importance of it, software nicer to work on.