I’ve been using git for several months now, waiting for a reason to keep my svn habits around. So far, it’s been pretty smooth sailing. There were some squalls along the way as I unlearned some habits from svn though. I even moved active development of my various open source projects to git. Well, today I’ve moved most of my “active” (and I say that in the loosest of terms) projects to github.

Github is fantastic, but why?. The core repository browser stuff looks and works great, but is nothing revolutionary, to be honest. What’s amazing about Github is how it really brings the social aspect into play. Chris and Tom are showing us all visually how git development is supposed to work. I know I personally had some bing moments once I started pulling in commits from external git repos.

For what it’s worth, Gitorious is another great community of git hackers. They’ve also added merge requests to the mix since the last time I looked at it. The differences with Gitorious are that it’s exclusively geared for open source projects, and that Gitorious itself is open source. That’s wild.

The great thing about git is that it doesn’t matter which you choose. You can easily add a git remote for both, and keep your origin on your own server. I hope we can see some collaboration between the two in the future. I know Github has some neat web hooks powering some backend processing functions. It’d be interesting to be able to initiate fork requests to your git[hub/orious] account by POSTing a public fetch url, or to send a user a pull/merge request by POSTing to a public end point (or emailing a git mailbox).

Naturally, as the author of Warehouse, I have other reasons for wanting to see this happen. I’d like to be able to collaborate with other git hacker networks and keep my data on my own server. The only way this is possible is if there’s a simple API we can all agree on.

At any rate, I firmly believe that fantastic tools like Github and Gitorious will do a lot to drive git adoption. Having clean, visual tools will go a long way in simplifying git for new users.

Update: Oh yea, I have a couple github invites if anyone wants them.