One of the core work duties I have is maintaining a few pieces of software that have to play nice. The biggest slice lives on a web server, inside a directory. In there is the school’s learning management system, as well as other pieces such as facilities bookings and other administrivia. Some of those pieces need supporting code, and some of them need to have patches and other adjustments in order for things to work just right.

Which is just to say that there’s a lot of disparate software. On top of my own adjustments, most of that code is controlled by others in the Open Source community, who maintain it, keep it sane, and add features every once in a while. I need a way to keep tabs on that activity too.

Github, which is a website that provides a hub to the lovely git version control software, is an absolute godsend for this. As a measure for seeing just how good it is, the vintage test would be to delete the folder that has all that software, and trying to restore it all. See how long it takes.

It’s not going to be as simple issuing a download command, because all those pieces of software come from all over the place. Depending on implementation details, they are going to be made available in different ways too.

That’s where git comes in, because with it and github working in tandem, if I were to delete all those pieces, it would take two commands to get it all back. The first one would simply download the repo, and the second one would update all the submodules.

Damn that’s sweet.