Open MPI Git Best Practices

For a nice, relatively brief overview of Git's basic usage, please see the Pro Git book by Scott Chacon, available for free online. If you want to understand the nitty-gritty, check out Git From the Bottom Up.

Otherwise, here are a list of typical "dos" and "don'ts" for Git, some with a specific eye towards Open MPI:

Do

make smaller, logically self-contained commits
write nice commit messages, with a concise subject line and a useful description of what change is being made and why
If you think you screwed up a repository (yours or a shared one), STOP and ask for help on [email protected]. Many Git operations are reversible if you don't take too many steps in the wrong direction.
run git gc on your repository periodically, it will speed up many operations and shrink the space consumed on disk by your .git directory

change published history
change published history!
delete or rename published tags, this is a real pain to unwind
make large rambling commits that intermix multiple unrelated changes
make unnecessary whitespace changes in the same commit where you are changing logic
commit any large binaries to the repository, this will rapidly increase the storage space required for everybody's clones
use git filter-branch unless you really know what you are doing, and especially don't use it on published history