Contributing with Git October 28, 2008

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Google Tech Talks
October 27, 2008

ABSTRACT

Source code versioning is an invaluable tool for software development:

- users can easily track the newest versions,
- maintainers can easily track down which commit introduced a bug (often
making it easier to come up with a fix),
- new developers get more documentation than just a big chunk of source
code,
- etc

In my talk I want to stress the importance of source code versioning in a related context: when contributing changes to an Open Source project, which is typically a moving target, it can take a few revisions of the patches until they are accepted. I present several scenarios and workflows, and describe how Git can help with them.

Speaker: Johannes Schindelin
Johannes studied mathematics with a strong bias to number theory, trying to stay away from applied science as far as possible. Failing, he went on to a software company, where he gave up after finding that code quality played a lower role than pure politics. So he went back to university (Wuerzburg, Germany) to get a PhD in neurogenetics, and after a brief stint at psychology (St Andrews, UK) he now works on image processing (MPI Dresden, Germany).