Now that Josh, a fellow CL student admin, has been using git for at least six months, I feel confident in doing so myself, because now I can just offload complaints and questions to him. Anyway, I've been using subversion for a year or so for very simple one-person source control, but it's a real pain to work from my parent's house with limited internet—I have no interest in installing RIM's USB tethering drivers on my ancient Powerbook. The other option is to come back to school and commit a giant patch that touches every file.

So I want to get back to distributed source control. I used darcs for a few years, but it lost the ability to pull patches to very out-of-date repos in a "reasonable" amount of time. That's scary, so I dropped it completely and went back to subversion. I knew git and hg were both gaining wide support at the time, but I wanted something that was stupidly reliable, and as a one-person dissertation-writing team, I don't need anything beyond revision control really.

Warning: These instructions worked for me on an Intel Mac running OS X 10.5 and a PPC Mac running 10.4 Server. Both have MacPorts installed and working as well as it ever does. In other words, I am not an expert. These instructions may be wrong. This is just the information I used to get git working.

1. Install git with svn from MacPorts
2. MacPorts crashed halfway through installing git-svn. It tends to fail a lot. I never got the step 1 instructions to work on PPC 10.4 Server, although this workaround works for Intel 10.5. Do it, *then* (re)run step 1.
3. If you put the git repo in the same directory as your old svn repo, run git reset --hard, because git otherwise won't touch the existing files.
4. Since I only had git-svn working on my local machine, I used these instructions to push the repository to the server.
5. Don't forget to git reset --hard again if the server's directory has the project files already there.

I learned about git reset --hard from the warning git printed and this discussion.

I also found a very nice git crash course for svn users, and instructions on how to use opendiff (aka FileMerge) for viewing diffs on OS X.