Question

I have installed git in Ubuntu and downloaded the Hadoop repository using the below command.

git pull git://git.apache.org/hadoop-common.git

Then I installed qgit (GUI for GIT), when I open the above repository in qgit the following screen comes up. Can someone explain the meaning of the different fields? Also, using the ‘Git tree’ how can I view the code for different branches, tags etc?

Answer 1

The top two options in that dialog are asking you for a range of commits to display from the commit graph. The default value for the most recent commit is HEAD, which represents the branch tip (or commit) that you are currently at. The “bottom”, or the oldest value has defaulted to one of the tags in your repository.

The other options in that dialog all have tooltips explaining what they do, but just to add a little more detail:

• working dir: If selected, this shows you the state of your working tree at the top of the displayed history in addition to all the committed versions.
• all branches: If selected this won’t just show you commits that are reachable working back from HEAD, but also those reachable from every branch.
• whole history: If selected, the range options at the top are disabled, and you see the history right back to the root commit(s) in the repository.

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The tips of branches in the “rev list” pane, which shows you the commit graph, are labelled with a box with a green background, while remote-tracking branches have a beige background. The “Git tree” pane shows you the state of the tree at the commit that you’ve selected. If you navigate to a file in that tree and double click on it, you’ll see the content of the file at that version and an indication of who most recently changed each line before that version.