Git

The Zen theme had its fifth birthday on October 11, 2011. While that milestone just slipped past without my notice, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about things that I’m grateful for. Zen, like Drupal core, improves because of the influx of new ideas and solutions to shared problems. And I’m extremely thankful to all those that have contributed their work.

More than simply saying “Thank you” to all those who’ve contributed patches to both the code and the documentation, I’ve decided to convert each contributor’s name into an actual Git commit. That sounds pretty geeky, but the real purpose of those commits is so each person’s name shows prominently where it belongs… on Zen’s Maintainers page.

I have a really useful Git tip for project maintainers below. But I’d also ask that you please join me (in the comments of this post) in thanking all of the people who have contributed to make Zen great.

If you read my previous post about converting Subversion repositories to git, you’ll know that to do a proper Subversion-to-Git transformation on a batch of repositories is going to take some time (what with all that command line typing). I had 142 legacy project Subversion repositories lying around I wanted converted to Git and, since I’m lazy, I pulled on my bash boots and wrote me a script to do the work!

With the git-svn-migrate scripts I wrote, you can batch convert all of your Subversion repositories in just 3 steps. And I’ve GPLed them and put them on GitHub if you’d like to collaborate and improve them; see the git-svn-migrate project page.

When I first realized that I needed a version control system, the best system at the time was CVS. (No, really.) Subversion was nearing 1.0, so I waited for its release and then used it everywhere. Well, that was 2003. Time for a change.

This past year, it became obvious that there were many Git users within the Drupal community, so Drupal has decided to move to Git. Since then I've started learning and researching the best ways to convert all my development to a Git-based workflow. So far… it rocks.