I decided to take some time today to clean up old sprint branches that have been resting in Git unused. Some for well over a year. I had two goals I wanted to accomplish when trying to come up with a workflow. First, I wanted the list of branches that display with the command git branch -a (which I have conveniently aliased to just gb) to be shortened. Second, I didn't want to lose any of the commits part of old branches. Sure the commits were already merged into the master branch, but I didn't want to lose commit chain that was stored as branches.

My solution was to archive each branch as a tag then remove the branches from Git on my local machine as well as the Git origin server.

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There's been a lot of talk about Git in the ColdFusion community recently. And rightly so, it's a really nice source control management system. But there's more to Git than source control. To find out other uses for Git I recommend folks read or listen to the interview with ProGit author and Git evangelist, Scott Chacon. Scott discusses how GitHub uses Git and describes a few other uses you probably haven't thought of. It's all right here. If you want to know what I think about Git, I wrote up my thoughts back in March.

As a programmer I've used all kinds of source control management solutions. From Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe, to CVS, to Subversion (SVN). I even wrote a 60 page whitepaper detailing the use of Apache, ColdFusion, and Subversion in a development environment. And I've been known to blog about source control from time to time.

Recently I began reviewing the Git source control system for the startup I'm working with. It was a good opportunity to investigate solutions beyond Subversion since there wasn't any previous repositories or "code baggage" to worry about. I began my review by talking with Russ Johnson, the first person to ever recommend Git to me. Russ highly recommends Git and was more than willing to answer my dumb questions and discuss what he saw as advantages when using Git over Subversion. For my thoughts on Git continue reading after the break. Or, if you want to go ahead and download my Git cheat sheet click, here.

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