Who cares about Git ? Or Mercurial ?

I do of course, most of you do I know, but that is not the point.

Why are Git and Mercurial being so popular ?

Why is so important where the code is, if it is inaccessible anyway.

Inaccessible here means you can’t easily access the code you need just because it is on this or on that repository.

There is an interesting article about Git and Mercurial in Technological Wasteland.

The current situation is: I’m learning Rails, in fact, more: I’m learning all this web application development stuff, having chosen Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework.

I was just trying to follow the 14th lesson from LearningRails, thanks to the BuildingWebApps guys, when this subject, about DVCS (Distributed Version Control System), comes up.

Why ? Just because one of the plugins I need to accomplish that lesson (“acts_as_textiled”) changed from SVN, which is a Centralized Version Control System, to GIT.

Well, I’m one of these members of the dumb majority who uses Windows.

Yes I have used it for years developing in VB, then more recently don’t need to change when developing in Java, and see no reason to change now (OK, OK, may be I see some reasons, but I’m a lazy 50 years old developer, Windows will be).

The point is: I use Windows and I use Netbeans, and none of them give nice and easy support for Git.

That was the first point of changing my mind, installing a Rails plugin into a Rails project through Netbeans, is ease, you just need to right click the project, open the plugins pane add the plugin project URL and install it.

It works fine for SVN stored plugins, but what the hell, appears to me now, every single project in the world is going into Git !

Planned support for Git in Netbeans ? Yes, but may take a while.

Support for Git in Windows, Yes, but you need to install Cygwin which was the first reason I give up from e-Editor, because it needs Cygwin for “advanced features”.

To be honest I’m not a command line fan, but since the changes on this Rails Web App community are so fast, you must be an agnostic IDE guy, or turn yourself into a command line fan.

Anyway, I give a Try on “Komodo Edit”, which appears to be a good option to Windows users.

After a full day of research about how to install an already downloaded Rails plugin through Netbeans, I give up; I just copied the plugin into the project vendor folder, restart the IDE and it appear to work. I will see soon.

After a few months using Netbeans, I start thinking I’m becoming productive on this Windows environment. But now, I’m not so sure…

I need to start testing some “command line” + “simple program editor” options on Windows environment.