A Plumber's Guide to Git

This is the April monthly meeting. Normally some of us go on to the pub afterwards.

Alex Chan will run a workshop on Git (previously presented at PyCon UK, and at CamPUG last year - yes, it's good enough to repeat!).

Git is a key part of many modern development workflows. It's incredibly powerful, but its complexity and idiosyncratic user interface means we often treat it as a magic black box. How does it actually work?

When we understand our tools, we become more confident and effective users. In this workshop, we'll take a low-level look at how Git works under the hood.

We'll use Git plumbing commands to reproduce a typical Git workflow (add, commit, branch, and so on) -- and peer inside the .git directory to see what's really going on. Along the way, we'll answer questions like:

• Where does Git store information? And how?
• What really happens when you run git commit?
• What's behind a branch?

Familiarity with basic Git will be helpful.

You'll need your own laptop, with Git and a text editor installed. We'll be using Git on the command line, not in a GUI.

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**How CamPUG uses meetup.com**

We mainly use meetup as a way of publicising meetings, at which it is very good. We also use the RSVP mechanism to get some idea of how many people will turn up to a meeting, but this is very inaccurate - at best, we normally get between half and two-thirds of the "yes" numbers attending.

We do not require people to pay for meetings, or acquire tickets, and we do not "take a register" of who actually turns up. We don't even insist that people have to use meetup to indicate they're coming. It is important to me that this be a free and open meeting.

This does mean that we could have a problem when a meeting is very popular and reaches the practical room size - i.e., how many will safely fit in our meeting room. Given our new venue, we don't think that is likely to happen in the near future, but we have put a limit on the number of "yes" RSVP replies: larger than the actual room size, but hopefully not too large.