Git, GitHub, forking: the new hotness

February 05, 2009 📬 Get My Weekly Newsletter

While working on my Gliffy Ruby Client, I decided I wanted a better way to describe the command line interface. Finding nothing that was any good, I whipped up GLI and refactored my Giffy command line client to use it. While doing that, I finally got annoyed at technoweenie's version of rest-client, and also noticed that the original author's had totally changed interfaces. So, clicked the nice "Fork" button on GitHub to get my own copy and fixed the issues. But that's not the cool part. The cool part is that I can change my Gliffy gem to depend on my rest-client implementation and, viola! No special instructions, no hacks, no nothing. This is a really cool thing that would be difficult with Subversion, impossible without RubyGems, and downright painful without GitHub.