[sword-devel] Project "Free Scriptures" started

DM Smith dmsmith at crosswire.org
Wed Feb 26 08:30:43 MST 2014


On Feb 26, 2014, at 9:24 AM, Troy A. Griffitts <scribe at crosswire.org> wrote:

> Though as an aside, just from a personal query, how do you guys get Windows and GUI Mac users to use git? I have at least 2 ancillary projects with SVN repos on CrossWire's server where the users are not programmers, the command line scares them, and they had no clue what a versioning system was before I installed TortoiseSVN for them. They are HTML designers, flash programmers, transcription editors, etc. It was a real task to get them to even begin to use SVN, but the integration right into the OS helped (and we found some Mac-y GUI thingy that was simple to use on OSX). I don't want to train them about a stash as well. That's just one more obstacle. Are there really mature GUI clients like these for the simple VC users. I know there are power GUIs. That is not my question. I'm asking about tools integrated into the OS which make VC simpler for the simple use?

At work we went from SVN to git. Most of our developers are on Windows.

TortoiseSVN worked very well for the most part. Sometimes there were decorator problems, but for the most part it was fairly easy. The devs just needed to understand the options available on the right-click menu in the MS Explorer. On rare occasions it was easier to do something from a command window. I typically had to do this as I wasn't on Windows and used the command line to do everything. The biggest problem was that transfers of large amounts of data over the http protocol would fail, requiring multiple attempts.

With git TortoiseGit was the obvious starting place. Setup was a pain. We chose to use SSL certificates for permissions. Installing these into TortoiseGit required some putty magic. And then the provided Git gui required additional setup. Once up and running, the user had to manage the certificate password well. Probably each user had to redo their SSL Certificate and putty setup because of this.

Using TortoiseGit is clumsy in comparison to TortoiseSVN. Since I was learning and living on the command line, when I was asked for help, I'd have to explain how each TortoiseGit command maps to the Git command. It was a bit of training. The "standard" gui from git is not very useful.

Then came along SourceTree by Atlassian, first for Mac and then for Windows 7. (One of our users is still on XP, but that will change when XP is no longer supported.) This has made life very simple. I highly recommend it. It is free to all. It also works with Mercurial projects.

At first glance SourceTree might be intimidating. It is a "power" GUI. But in practice it is straight forward. Creating a cheat sheet would be an easy thing to do, if people don't want to use the excellent help.

In His Service,
	DM
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