I’m not new to version control, but am new to version control through the internet. I’m sure there will be a lot of other newbies who are struggling the same way I am. I’m not familiar with the commandline approach mentioned by many here. I’m sure there are many more programmers who don’t know how to do it because they don’t know why it’s relevant/helpful. Please help us understand, by answering this question.
First, I wanted to know why people checkout opensource files from the internet, when people can simply download and build the source locally.
I want to use Git to get the latest code from the VirtualPlanetBuilder website (I know how to download the zip source, and that’s not what I’m asking).
There are many Git downloads here, but I want to know if any one of these is specifically meant for checking out files from the internet.
When I try clicking the Git-read-only link here, I get an alert saying “Firefox does not know how to open this address because the protocol (git) is not associated with any program”. I already have Git-1.7.11-preview20120620.exe installed, so what does this alert/error mean, and what should I do to get the source of VirtualPlanetBuilder on my disk?
There’s no specific version of Git for specific use cases. You simply need to clone the repository – which could be local to your network, your machine or on the internet.
Checking out code rather than downloading it would give you the advantage of being able to amend it and keep your changes tracked if you needed to. It’d also make it simpler to update your copy –
git fetch,git pull.From a command prompt:
git clone https://github.com/openscenegraph/VirtualPlanetBuilder.gitYou’ll probably want to look at getting a Git GUI for Windows though: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/157476/what-guis-exist-for-git-on-windows