As a follow up to the move of Thermite3D to Git I'm happy to announce that PolyVox has also now been converted to git and is hosted on Gitorious at http://gitorious.org/polyvox/polyvox.

To get the code you'll need a git client and then you can clone the repository at git://gitorious.org/polyvox/polyvox.git. With command-line Git you do this withThe subversion repository will remain for a while but no new code will be committed there so to stay up-to-date you'll have to get the Git version. Dave or I will update the build documentation on the website as soon as we can.

If you want to stay follow development you can also subscribe to the Atom feed which contains all the commits and feature merges.

Patches

If you want to contribute patches to PolyVox the preferred method is to use Gitorious' Merge Request feature. This works by you making an online clone of the Git repository through the Gitorious web interface and pushing your changes to a branch in that repo. You can then request a merge of this branch into the main repo also through the web interface.

Documentation

For those of you who are new to git -- if you simply want to stay up-to-date with the latest PolyVox code then there's little change to your workflow. Simply replace svn up with git pull or git pull --rebase. As for learning Git there are three free online books I've used: http://book.git-scm.com, http://progit.org/book and http://gitref.org and if you're interested in the underlying details a bit there's the Git Parable which is useful for understanding how Git works.

If anyone has any questions or problems with Git please post them here and I'll see what I can do to help.

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Matt Williams
Linux/CMake guy

Great job Matt.

For those who don't know, one of the main advantages of Git over SVN is that once you have cloned the repository you are able to commit changes to it. This means that if you are modifying PolyVox or adding some kind of extension then you get all the benefits of source control without affecting our main repository.

Hopefully this allows people to carry on experimenting with new features, while we focus on polishing and stabilising what we already have (more on that in the near future...).

David,

What git client do you use on windows? I have never had luck getting tortoiseGIT to work, it always gives me errors when trying to download.

I can't find a native command line version of git for windows. I guess I will have to resort to msysgit...

You can use msysgit with MSYS, or you can build/downlowd git for cygwin. TortoiseGit uses msysgit, so you might have forgotten to set it up to know where msysgit is. Also, some repositories or some URLs for repositories require a key to be set up (especially for write access), which can easily be done in msys or cygwin, but you can also download putty, specifically the puttygen, which will generate a public/private key pair. Personally, I use the portable version of msysgit, together with tortoisegit to make things easy.

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irc://irc.freenode.net/#polyvox

When in Windows, I've been using Git Extensions which bundles msysgit (including git-gui and gitk) along with it. For almost all tasks it performs great, I've only had to resort to the command line once.

I believe David just uses plain msysgit though.

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Matt Williams
Linux/CMake guy

I ended up just using msysgit command line, it's convenient enough if all you are doing is cloning the repository...

I've just been using the standard GUI which comes with Git (not sure what it's called). There is an illustrated guide to it here which I've used a couple of times: http://nathanj.github.com/gitguide/tour.html

I've been meaning to try the Git extensions at some point but haven't got around to it yet. I also found SmartGit which has probably the polished user interface.

I'm also new to Git so it's taken some getting used to (I've only just found out how to fetch the latest changes - before that I was just getting a fresh copy every times there were updates available!) but it does make a lot of sense once you are used to it.