Is TortoiseGit ready for prime time yet?

Question

I'm a big fan of the simplicity of TortoiseSVN. I also am interested in digging into git, and think it would make a good fit for an upcoming project. However, a strictly command-line based app can be a little intimidating. I've followed the TortoiseGit project for a little while, and it looks like they are past 1.0.

Is there anyone using it in the wild right now? How's it working out? Does it let you use all of the features in git well?

If not, is there something else that works well? I'm really only looking at git based things right now.

Answer 1

So far I'm using TortoiseGit 1.0.2.0 just for file status indication in explorer, and sometimes it just doesn't show the icons anymore for a given project (I didn't figure out yet what is the patterns that leads to that behavior).

IMHO in the long term it's better to learn to use git commands directly.

UPDATE

If TortoiseGit is not showing the file status icons, then delete the index_cached.igit file inside your .git folder.

Answer 2

SmartGit is coming along nicely, but it is in a very early stage of development. I'm actively using SmartCVS at the moment but migrating to git slowly. If SmartCVS and SmartSVN are anything to go by, it's going to be a good move on Syntevo's part.

But, as alexandrul said I think you should take the time to learn the command line tools as well.

(Just my opinion - I've no connection with Syntevo apart from being a happy customer!)

Answer 3

Oct2010 Note: My (below) answer is more than a year old now. Consider it historical :-). I have no idea how TortoiseGit is faring lately.

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Unless you're prepared for pain or failure, it's not ready for primetime. They've yet to add detailed installation instructions or descriptive error messages, and if you accept msysgit and TortoiseGit defaults it will not work until further voodoo is performed. It's not obvious to me what that entails.

Update: I finally got TortoiseGit to work on one of my two systems. I ended up going into a cmd console and trying to run git.exe without the msys environment.. and this led me to discover that git.exe couldn't find libcurl-4.dll. Added my msysgit\mingw\bin dir to the system Path to ensure that it would be found (along with a couple other related paths which I'd already added), and it finally worked. If the "Check now" button in the TortoiseGit settings doesn't display a version, then you can bet that the dll isn't being found. There really ought to be an error for that - and this is a reason why I say it's not ready.

Answer 4

This is my favourite bit from the SmartGit license:

3.2 The SOFTWARE must not be used if its use may result in injuries of life, body, health of human beings or injuries of animals or ecological damages (e.g. no use for atomic reactors, weapons and medical appliances).

Are they serious??

Answer 5

TortoiseGit offers many advantages over the command line git. I've been using it and I think it's great and have recommended it to the other developers I work with.

And the ammount of 'voodo' was minimal compared to what I had to do to install and get git running on my Centos server.

Answer 6

Git is ready for primetime, and if you go with TortoiseGit at least you will have a great set of tools to fall back on in case weird things happen.

imho weird things always happen with VCSs, and git does a great job of reducing that frequency.