Git
Had a busy two weeks reviving the Cpu-Hotplug effort. Two versions have already been posted and the just finished porting the third one against the latest kernel version. And that’s when I finally got around to use Git.
Git is a source code management software project started by Linus Torvalds and now maintained by Junio Hamano. There are probably a million howtos out there,on how to use Git, but I followed the one which I thought was easier for me to follow, given the nature of my job.
I cloned the git repository and created my own branches, ported the cpu-hotplug patches. For a person who had been using quilt all this while to create and maintain patches, git is very useful. The best part is that you could actually see the whole development process since it keeps track of each commit. So for example, if I wanted to know how a particular file, say kernel/cpu.c has changed over years, I just type
git whatchanged kernel/cpu.c
and you could see every single commit that went in since version 2.6.12 something. Pretty Amazing!
Next time I am wondering why a particular ‘if’ clause exists in the code, using git, I can find out, who added it, and what was the changelog look like when it was added.
Other than that, you could also checkout a particular kernel version say 2.6.18. So instead of maintaining a whole bunch of compressed kernel source files, all I need now is a git repo and maintain different branches for different development projects that I am working on.
The other cool utility was StGit. It’s a quilt type of a utility that allows you to create new patches, push and pop. So developers already familiar with quilt can use that with atmost ease.
Hope to discover more useful features with continued usage 
And here’s to a Great Weekend ahead!!
