[rescue] Has freshmeat.net disappeared forever? WAS:::Re: What to do with the SS20

[Peter Corlett]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 04:24:52PM -0500, Jerry Kemp wrote:
[...]
> Among other things, I primarily do network and Unix administration. When I
> download source code to compile, I want it to be in the form of a tar.Z, or
> tar.bz2 or .... you get the idea.

I have some sympathy for that view, however a "git clone foo.git" does just go
and download and unpack the thing for you and dump it into "foo/". Less typing
involved! The only real downer is if the upstream repository is particularly
bloated and/or over the wrong end of a slow connection, and the download takes
much longer as a result. (Or if you've not got enough space for the .git
directory, although that probably means you also don't have enough space to
build it.)

You win if you discover that the version you downloaded doesn't work and want
to try a different version. Because you now have a full local copy of
everything, "git checkout <version>" will just switch the local source tree to
the new version.

Wearing my sysadmin hat, git is rather handy for tracking changes to files in
/etc. You don't need to configure an upstream repository at all, and it works
very much like RCS for this use case.