Stefan Sperling
My first experiences with version control were with CVS in ca. 2004.
I became a contributor to the Subversion project in 2007, before the project was moved under the Apache umbrella. I ended up co-developing several major features for Subversion, such as the redesigned working copy format of SVN 1.7, the 'svn patch' command, and an improved merge conflict resolution system in SVN 1.10 and later which can track file renames through merges.
I spent more than a decade consulting and running workshops for European companies and organizations using Subversion and, when its adoption started to increase, Git. I am still supporting the Subversion project and its users today, though in a smaller capacity.
In 2017, with encouragement and help from friends in the OpenBSD community as well as the Subversion and Git project communities, I started writing a new tool from scratch based on the Git repository format design, which became the Game of Trees project.
Session
This half-day workshop provides an introduction to the Game of Trees version control system.
Game of Trees (Got) is a version control system which prioritizes ease of use and simplicity over flexibility.
Game of Trees is being developed on OpenBSD. A portable version runs on FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, MacOS, and Linux.
Game of Trees uses Git repositories to store versioned data, and can be used as a drop-in replacement or as a companion to Git.
It will always remain possible to work with both Game of Trees and Git on the same repository.
Game of Trees is an original version control system which relies on prior art, takes what makes Git's design great, leaves out some parts that make Git hard to use, and invents new parts for an end result which serves the needs of its developers and many other people who use version control.
Simple and consistent interface design makes Game of Trees approachable, while still being powerful enough for making contributions to projects which use Git.
If you find Git intimidating and confusing, or if you only ever use a handful of the 322 commands Git provides and become frustrated when something goes wrong, you might enjoy using Game of Trees.
Even if you have never used Git, or any version controls system at all, learning Game of Trees will prepare you well for learning tools such as Git, Mercurial, and Jujutsu, later on.
This workshop's main focus will be the Game of Trees command line client and repository browser for text terminals.
Game of Trees can also be used to host Git repositories on servers, and we will briefly touch on this, too.