The more time you spend developing applications the more you come to appreciate software that tracks your revision history. A revision control system lets you create a sandbox for new approaches to problems, maintain multiple branches of released code, and provide a development history in the event of intellectual property disputes. Linux and Unix support many source code control systems ranging from the early and primitive SCCS and RCS to concurrent systems such as CVS and SVN and the modern distributed development systems such as GIT and FOSSIL.

The big advantage of Git and Fossil over older systems such as CVS and SVN is that a developer can use them without being connected to a network. Older systems such as CVS and RCS worked fine when you were at the office, but you could not check the new code or examine the old code while working remotely.

Git and Fossil are two different revision control systems with some similarities and some differences. Both support the distributed development model of revision control. Git provides source code control and has a number of add-on applications for more information while Fossil is a single executable that provides revision control, trouble tickets, a Wiki, web pages and technical notes.

Git is used for the Linux kernel development and has been adopted by many open source developers. Fossil was designed for the SQLite development team and is also widely used in both the open source and closed source communities.

Git is included with most Linux distributions. If it's not available on your system, you can install it with either yum (Redhat or SuSE) or apt-get (Debian or Ubuntu).

    $ sudo yum install git-all
    $ sudo apt-get install git-all

Using Git

The git system uses the git command with many subcommands to perform individual actions. We'll discuss git clone, git commit, git branch, and others.

To use git you need a code repository. You can either create one yourself (for your projects) or clone a remote repository.