Using git with Eclipse 2 —14 August 2011

I’ve been using git with Eclipse for about a month now.

• git svn rebase doesn’t work in Eclipse gui. All the gui methods I tried say the repo is up to date, even though it’s not.
• Synchronize workspace was very slow the few times I tried, so I don’t use it anymore.
• Not sure yet how to work with maven sub-projects. It seems for all sub-projects I have to do “share project” to associate with git. Otherwise I don’t get the git actions in the Team menu of sub-projects.

About git on the command line, and in general…

• Branch switching is nice and easy, quite fantastic actually.
• I’m sure in speed benchmarks git will always beat all other VCS. In practice, I don’t notice a difference, at all.
• git svn dcommit is nice, git will commit each commit one by one. Not sure bzr can do this so easily.
• The git shell in windows is great! Since cygwin is not an option for me, the git bash shell is a fantastic alternative.
• Browsing repository history is not nearly as easy and intuitive as bzr.
• SHA as revision identifier is uncomfortable to use. I need to grab for the mouse all the time for copy-and-paste.
• Before trying git the staging area looked the most attractive feature to me, with the ability to commit only hunks. In practice, I hardly ever want to commit specific hunks only, and it’s a bad practice anyway to commit untested code. Overall, having to stage every modification is not practical for me.

Overall, I really like git. I will use it when it’s the right tool for a job, but for now I will continue to use bzr for my personal (and admittedly light-weight) projects.