Git goes native
Posted by Steve Revill Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:46:00 GMT
First demonstrated in the February 2023 developer fireside chat, over the last nine months, a select band of volunteers have been providing feedback on the previews of the Git client for RISC OS, watching it gain more and more functionality at every step. Today we’re able to make that a wider release, as many of the most commonly used operations are supported.
What is Git?
Git is a widely used version control system in the Open Source community. Indeed, the sources to RISC OS itself are held in Git and you can explore them online using a web browser. When a developer wants to work on the source code themselves they’ll probably prefer to check out a specific version for making edits and running the result locally on their computer – and that’s where a Git client comes in handy.
More generally, Git can by used to track the changes to any set of files, allowing you to easily go back to an earlier version, and to see what’s changed and when.
Modes of operation
Git is extremely flexible in use, possibly even too flexible, which is why we have a cheatsheet for updating the sources to RISC OS to help. The native client is similarly flexible depending on your preferred workflow:
- Use Git at the command line using a syntax familiar to users from Unix and Windows
- Use Git interactively in the desktop to browse the change history of a repository with a handy graphical tree
- Mount the Git repository as a RISC OS Image Filing System, and browse the history using the standard Filer; the directory tree is generated dynamically from the repository contents
Getting your copy
Simply download the current version, and take a look at the ReadMe for details. There’s still a reasonable amount of work left in the project plan before this can be considered complete, so be aware that only a subset of Git’s full command repertoire is currently available, but if you spot anything missing or not working please get in touch or by using the email address detailed in the download.
This new software builds upon other Open Source libraries such as zlib, mbedTLS, and libgit2.
It’s being developed as a project under the bounty scheme, take a look – perhaps there’s a project you’d like to sponsor?
Now that we can use git to retrieve opensource projects, it would be nice to have options in DDE so the compilers can work with filename extensions instead of c, h, etc folders.