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.