Yeah, I acknowledge I have a very strong preference to work with GIT for source control, so I am always delighted when I can wrapper repositories to work with GIT.  It's been my recent misfortune to have to access a TFS repository, fortunately there is a wrapper for that (actually more than one).  As I work from both Linux and Windows environment, a cross platform wrapper is the logical solution, so I will be discussing git-tf.

Microsoft themselves put this wrapper out, want to know more about why? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/01/30/git-init-vs.aspx  My guess is that GIT is catching on so this is a nice way to keep TFS relevant.  For whatever the reason is it does get us GIT users a nice wrapper to keep us happily isolated.

The git-tf project home can be found here: http://gittf.codeplex.com/
Additionally, the official download page can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30474

While the instructions are good, I did have a few troubles with Ubuntu 12.10 getting connected (namely proxy stuff).  So this is really just to help me remember how I got through them.

First I decompress the download and add the path to that binary to my PATH environment variable.  To do this permanently, I simply add the following to my ~/.profile:

The /current folder is actually a symbolic link that can be moved to point to the latest download.  This prevents me from having to make edits for new versions (rather I can just move the system link).

Now from a terminal I can easily clone a repository with clone:

Note the --deep option.  That instructs git-tf that you want to clone each TFS change set (like git-svn), and they are nice to have on hand.

Now, if you don't want to be prompted for credentials every time you run git-tf, you can store your credentials in your GIT configuration.  It is important to realize that this will be stored as plain text (~./gitconfig), so the password might not be such a good idea.

I work for a company that is behind a firewall (i.e. proxy access for the outside world).  When running git-tf it will use the http_proxy / HTTP_PROXY environment value.  If your TFS server is inside the firewall you will fail when you go to authenticate (as it is trying to route through the proxy).  So to fix this and maintain the proxy for the remainder of the system, I just open a terminal and clear the proxy variables for that terminal as follows:

Note, not all of them need to be cleared, just the http_proxy and HTTP_PROXY, I just clear them all for piece of mind.  Also realize this is not a permanent setting, this will need to be done every time the terminal is closed and reopened.  The git-tf commands will work in this terminal.

There are simply some things with GIT (and GIT SVN) I don't use often enough to always remember how I want to go about doing something.  As a result, this is going to be my GIT cheat sheet (a running list of notes) that I will update as I go along (or need to).

When I perform a GIT rebase and there are conflicts, the difftool will launch (for me that is Meld), displaying a 3-way difference.  The middle pane is always easy to remember what it is, but the left and right panes I find myself confused.  The panes are as follows:

• Left pane (.LOCAL) is the incoming from the SVN "trunk".
• Middle pane is what we want it to be in the end.
• Right pane (.REMOTE) is the local GIT branch (that is being rebased).

Creating a single difference patch between two tags (tag1 and tag2) where multiple commits exist:

Realize, this will produce a patch that will turn tag1 into tag2, flipping them in the command would produce a reverse patch.