Chapter 1. Local Git
This chapter covers
- Why Git was created
- Creating a new local Git repository
- Committing files into a Git repository
- Viewing the history of a Git repository
- Using gitk/GitX to visualize the history of a Git repository
- Viewing the differences between Git commits
In this chapter, you’ll learn how and why to use Git as a local version control system. Let’s start by learning why Git is so widely used by programmers.
Git was created by a programmer to be used by programmers. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, started writing Git in 2005 with the goal of having a distributed, open-source, high-performance, and hard-to-corrupt version control system for the Linux kernel project to use. Within a week, Git’s source code was hosted inside the Git version control system; and within two and a half months, version 2.6.12 of the Linux kernel was released using Git.