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x-git-update-to-latest-version

This morning in the git mailing list, I wrote a small shell recipe to update your git to the latest version but keeping the previous ones around, in case something goes wrong.

I noticed that what I wrote was a lot better than the hack-and-slash script I was using, so I promoted a cleaned up version of that to my scripts stash. Hence, you can now download x-git-update-to-latest-version and enjoy painless git updates.

You need to tweak two things at the top of the script:

  • the location on your hard drive of the git.git clone (you need to create that with git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git first);
  • the base directory where all the git versions will live.

You'll end up with something like this (I use /usr/local as my base directory):

melo@MrTray:melo $ ls -dla /usr/local/git*
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   25 Jul  4 10:05 /usr/local/git -> git-v1.5.6.1-204-g6991357
drwxr-xr-x   7 root  wheel  238 Jul  4 10:05 /usr/local/git-v1.5.6.1-204-g6991357

Each version will be named git-VERSION where VERSION is the output of git-describe. A symbolic link named git points to the latest version.

Just add BASEDIR/git/bin to your PATH and your are done.