Git Quick Start

Git is one of the version control options offered by Nokia Developer Projects. It is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency (see  http://git-scm.com/ for more information).

Using Git in Windows

Git command line on Windows

In Windows you can choose between a command line tool (msysgit) and GUI applications. One of the most common UI's is TortoiseGit. In order to install TortoiseGit you have to install  msysgit anyway. As an alternative you can install Git as part of  Cygwin.

TortoiseGit

TortoiseGit is a very common Git client integrated with Windows Explorer. You may read more about it and download it from its  homepage.

If you have problems with TortoiseGit you probably have not installed properly  msysgit. Please, make sure you have installed msysgit 1.7.1 or later before you even try to run TortoiseGit. If TortoiseGit says you have not installed Git, you have to make sure your PATH is correct. See  this thread on their support forums.

Setting your Git username

Users should commit to their project repository using their Nokia Developer username. If that is not already set globally, you can set it locally for the current Git repository like this:

git config user.name "YOUR NOKIA DEVELOPER USERNAME"
git config user.email "USERNAME@EXAMPLE.COM"

In many cases the default will be just your e-mail address, Nokia Developer hides the complete email address from the Projects' pages.

If you are using TortoiseGit you may use the application's preferences.

Using the right protocol to clone

Projects supports Git over HTTP and SSH. Also, you may choose to use HTTP or HTTPS. All these protocols are enabled by default, but project owners may choose to limit them. Note that if you use SSH, you must set your SSH key in your preferences (see ProjectsConfigureSSHKeys).

When you want to clone a project you may use the command shown at the top of the source page and you may choose the protocol to use. This is done for you convenience. By default the highest security is chosen, but you may click on the available buttons to choose a different one. This is how it looks by default:

And this is how it looks when you choose an alternative protocol, for example HTTP:

Choose the protocol and level of security that suits you best.

Proxies, firewalls and other network appliances might affect which protocols you can choose and their performance.

Git TLS issue

The Git packages in Ubuntu are compiled against curl that is linked to gnutls. Gnutls seems to have buggy behavior with TLS version selection, and the TLS handshake fails when our SSL frontend does not accept TLS1.1. Since this behavior cannot be changed except by patching git or libcurl the easiest workaround at the moment is compiling git binaries that are linked to openssl.

This is how you can do it in Ubuntu after having downloaded the tar.gz package of Git and using aptitude for the other packages:

# aptitude install libcurl4-openssl-dev build-essential
# tar xzf git.tar.gz
# cd git
# ./configure –with-openssl
# make install

By default git will be installed in /usr/local. You can also skip the install part and put the source directory on your PATH like this (make sure you are in the source directory for this):

export PATH=`pwd`:$PATH