Using git and GitHub

Developing on pioneer means using the version control tool 'git' and the github website. git especially has a reputation for having a steep learning curve.

Prerequisites

A working installation of git, and a github account.

If you're on Linux you quite quite likely have git installed already. If you can type git --version at the command line and get a version number back you're good to go. If you don't have it the package repository for your distribution almost certainly will. Use your distribution's package management tools to download and install it.

If you're the type of Linux user who builds everything from source, rolling your own kernels, I'm going to assume you're already quite familiar with git, and this was not the page you were looking for :)

On Windows you have two options, Git for Windows aka msysgit, or Github for Windows which is essentially msysgit but with some extra stuff bundled. Some of which is good (posh git) and some of which is well, not (github's 'friendly' gui). Since both include the sames command line tools and cross platform gui tools, either is fine for our purposes here.