### 2.6 Making and reviewing changes
-Now that we have a grasp of viewing history in Mercurial, let’s take a
+Now that we have a grasp of viewing history in git, let’s take a
look at making some changes and examining them.
The first thing we’ll do is isolate our experiment in a repository of
-its own. We use the “hg clone” command, but we don’t need to clone a
+its own. We use the “git clone” command, but we don’t need to clone a
copy of the remote repository. Since we already have a copy of it
locally, we can just clone that instead. This is much faster than
cloning over the network, and cloning a local repository uses less
disk space in most cases, too.
- $ cd ..
- $ hg clone hello my-hello
- 2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
- $ cd my-hello
+ $ cd ..
+ $ git clone hello my-hello
+ Initialized empty Git repository in /home/cworth/src/hgbook-git/my-hello/.git/
+ 0 blocks
+
+ [XXX We say "empty" here, (presumably from the git-init part),
+ but shouldn't the command also report the succesful clone
+ which makes it non-empty? And what the heck does "0 blocks"
+ mean?]
As an aside, it’s often good practice to keep a “pristine” copy of a
remote repository around, which you can then make temporary clones of
local clones are so cheap, there’s almost no overhead to cloning and
destroying repositories whenever you want.
+Alternatively, you can achieve much the same effect by creating
+multiple branches in a single repository, (but we won't go into detail
+on how to do that in this chapter). Some people greatly appreciate
+having multiple branches in a single repository rather than having
+many repositories cluttering up their filesystem. Other people prefer
+the ability to have working-tree changes, and intermediate build
+files, etc. each isolated in a separate repository per branch. Both
+modes are very well-supported by git, so it's really a matter of which
+you find most appropriate at any time given your tastes and project
+workflows.
+
In our my-hello repository, we have a file hello.c that contains the
classic “hello, world” program. Let’s use the ancient and venerable
sed command to edit this file so that it prints a second line of
you probably won’t want to use sed; simply use your preferred text
editor to do the same thing.)
- $ sed -i '/printf/a∖∖tprintf("hello again!∖∖n");' hello.c
-
-Mercurial’s “hg status” command will tell us what Mercurial knows
-about the files in the repository.
-
- $ ls
- Makefile hello.c
- $ hg status
- M hello.c
+ $ sed -i '/printf/a\\tprintf("hello again!\\n");' hello.c
-The “hg status” command prints no output for some files, but a line
-starting with “M” for hello.c. Unless you tell it to, “hg status” will
-not print any output for files that have not been modified.
+The “git status” command will tell us what git knows about the files
+in the repository.
-The “M” indicates that Mercurial has noticed that we modified
-hello.c. We didn’t need to inform Mercurial that we were going to
-modify the file before we started, or that we had modified the file
-after we were done; it was able to figure this out itself.
+ $ ls
+ hello.c Makefile
+ $ git status
+ # On branch master
+ # Changed but not updated:
+ # (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
+ #
+ # modified: hello.c
+ #
+ no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
+
+We see that “git status” command prints a line with "modified" for
+hello.c. The “git status” command will not print any output for files
+that have not been modified.
+
+Notice that we didn’t need to inform git that we were going to modify
+the file before we started, or that we had modified the file after we
+were done; it was able to figure this out itself.
It’s a little bit helpful to know that we’ve modified hello.c, but we
might prefer to know exactly what changes we’ve made to it. To do
-this, we use the “hg diff” command.
+this, we use the “git diff” command.
- $ hg diff
- diff -r b57f9a090b62 hello.c
- --- a/hello.c Tue Sep 06 15:43:07 2005 -0700
- +++ b/hello.c Sun Jun 17 18:05:50 2007 +0000
- @@ -8,5 +8,6 @@ int main(int argc, char ⋆⋆argv)
- int main(int argc, char ⋆⋆argv)
- {
- printf("hello, world!∖");
- + printf("hello again!∖n");
- return 0;
- }
+ $ git diff
+ diff --git a/hello.c b/hello.c
+ index 9a3ff79..6d28887 100644
+ --- a/hello.c
+ +++ b/hello.c
+ @@ -8,5 +8,6 @@
+ int main(int argc, char **argv)
+ {
+ printf("hello, world!\");
+ + printf("hello again!\n");
+ return 0;
+ }
### 2.7 Recording changes in a new changeset