This post is for those of you that build QGIS on a regular basis and want to keep up with everything going on in the current release branches (1.7.2 and 1.8) as well as the master branch that will eventually become version 2.0.
While you can do all your work in one clone, this method has a couple of advantages, at the expense of a bit of disk space:
Quicker compiles compared to branch switching, especially if you are using ccache Less likelihood of making a merge mess when switching branches The basic steps are:
One of the challenges in any open source project is accepting contributions from people that don’t have, need, or want access to your centralized source code repository. Managing repository accounts for occasional or one-time contributors can be come a bit of an administrative issue. To date, the QGIS project has accepted one-time or occasional contributions through patches submitted via a help ticket.
To make it easier for you to contribute to QGIS, we have created a clone of the Subversion repository on GitHub.
Using Git with Subversion makes adding new features easy. Here are the metrics for my latest QGIS hack:
SVN revisions by others while working on my branch: 177 Time to complete merge with latest SVN revision: 1 second
Conflicts: None
Coincidence? Maybe not.
This weekend I finished reviewing Pragmatic Version Control Using Git by Travis Swicegood. If you are a git user or interested in learning about the latest in version control for your source code, check it out. The book is available in beta now.