Git Getting Stronger
In my book review of Travis Swicegood's Pragmatic Version Control Using Git, I commented about Git's poor support for Windows. I recently encountered a situation where I had to use a Windows client to access my Git repositories.
I installed the latest build of msysgit and was pretty impressed with its level of integration. While it still requires the installation of a mini-Cygwin-like environment that could expose more than a few potential security issues, I have to admit that the client works fairly well. Now if only someone would write a native Windows Git client like TortoiseSVN, I would be even more comfortable using Git on Windows.
Speaking of Git, tech blogger Jason Rudolf recently posted a useful writeup on 10 reasons to upgrade your old git installation. Referencing the latest 1.6.3 release notes, several notable improvements to Git are highlighted. In particular, git clone and git merge operations are even faster now that they've been rewritten in piping hot C. Other slick features are the color console-based ASCII ancestry tree graph (hooray - I no longer have to install Tcl and wait an eternity for the language bindings and GUI to load just to see what basic project branches look like), and git grep makes text searches much easier on the eyes. (Incidentally, for those who have yet to be introduced to Git, check out Scott Chacon's GitCasts series. I highly recommend his 30 minute RailsConf Git Talk episode as an excellent Git primer.
I waved goodbye to CVS and Subversion some time ago, and even with other VCS's like Mercurial and Bazaar gaining greater visibility, Git continues to adequately suit my cross-platform development version control needs.

