I haven't tried out Git yet, but I think this feature may be the most impressive example of what Linus Torvalds said awhile back about Git: that perhaps its most significant advantage would be the tools that people will be able to build on top of it.
This seems like an excellent example, especially since it's not something that I could see being feasibly grafted onto Subversion. I've got a personal codebase that I'm planning on making into an open source project, and this feature alone makes me inclined to try out GitHub.
> and this feature alone makes me inclined to try out GitHub.
Yes, do it. GitHub is -perfect- for small projects that might otherwise die on your hard-drive. Because it's so easy to fork and there's no "ownership", you can stop maintaining it and if someone finds it useful, they can add their changes it and keep it going. This is one of the best use cases for git/github.
Neat. I'm new to Git, and so far have mostly been treating it like Subversion, emailing patches to each other (yeah... I know... shame on me). Maybe this will help transition my way of thinking to "the Git way".
What sort of workflow do you suggest for testing out a set of changes before applying them to your main repository? Perhaps applying them to a test branch or something, then merging the test branch?
edit: just tried this out and got this seemingly impossible status message... "Status: Processing 1 of 0 Commits"
edit2: I didn't actually select any changes to apply... but the status message is deceiving
Yes, that would be the suggested workflow - to use this to easily cherry-pick patches into an integration branch that you want and ignore the ones that don't look ready yet. Then pull that one branch down locally and merge it into your master once it's tested. It automatically adds the 'Signed-Off-By' sig and everything.
One more reason I'm so glad I moved all my code over to github. Git + github is such a great combo, for both open source and private projects too. Thanks dudes!
This seems like an excellent example, especially since it's not something that I could see being feasibly grafted onto Subversion. I've got a personal codebase that I'm planning on making into an open source project, and this feature alone makes me inclined to try out GitHub.