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Carina C. Zona

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In the beginning there was GitX

I keep meeting developers who still use the old GitX developed by pieter, unaware there's anything newer. Head's up: it hasn't had a new commit for 3 years.

"This fork is no longer active." (wiki)

And it begat children

Two forks arose in its place. Both added substantial new feature sets, taking slightly different approaches.

One of these, brotherbard's GitX, has since fallen by the wayside too; its last commit was a year and a half ago.

Whereas the other successor, German Laullon's GitX(L) remains under very active development. This quarter alone, there have been a couple dozen commits including accepting 10 pull requests from other developers. The GitX(L) homepage currently lists 90 contributors including brotherbard himself.

This is what open source excels at. Someone abandoned a project, and others rolled with it. Consensus built up around one of the forks, and a community has sprung up to keep it thriving.

Upgrade to GitX(L), if you haven't already. It's gotten some really nice enhancements along the way.

And one of those begat a child too

The story doesn't end with GitX(L) either. It's been forked too, by a new project called GitX(R) which is focusing on

"…working with the latest tools for developing software for current Apple platforms. As such, it only supports 64-bit Intel macs, and currently deploying versions of OS X and Xcode… [W]e are prioritizing moving away from deprecated or unreliable technologies like a dependency on command-line git usage to drive GitX features; and staying up-to-date with Apple and third-party frameworks and libraries that are used."

In practice only Lion or higher is supported ("Snow Leopard may or may not work"), plus XCode 4.3 is strongly recommended.

Some of the folks I teach or collaborate with are Snow Leopard users. So for the moment I'm sticking with GitX(L) for those brief times when we need to flip over to a GUI. But the ongoing story of GitX is good for everybody.

Pick your favorite poison. If not one of the GitX forks, goodness knows there are plenty of other options.

UPDATE: GitX(R) is now named GitX-dev