Gitcraft

A good witch commits her spells to a book, and shares them freely. Check the image below, and note the basic water sigil at the root.

Soon after, the spell changes, but the book tracks the changes, and every version of the spell.

Moving up the tree, you can see this spell splits into two versions, so the witch could access both at any time. These splits sometimes happen when witches try variations on a spell, and sometimes they happen because of witches sharing spells, and each making their own changes.

The most powerful spells combine different elements together, so the final commit joins both sigils into one, merging the features of both spells into each other, and creating something more powerful.

This way of sharing knowledge began shortly after the dawn of time, and has remained the default method of crafting clear instructions, to tell the world what you want.

Praxis

If you modify a weapon and someone else adds a spell, nobody wants to deal with merging those two ideas together. Git puts your changes together for you.

If you have an idea, but you want to show it to someone before committing to it, git lets you make a copy of the project, then give someone your copy and your new ideas. They can then make changes before putting it into the book.

Setup

Setting up git it easy. Just install git with your package manager (probably sudo apt install git) then give it the same username and email as you use on Github.

git config --global user.name "Your Unchanging Name"
git config --global user.email "email@eternal.tld"

You don't need to use your real name, but you do need to keep a consistent name and email.

Your email will be public, and is used for people to ask why you made a particular change, in case your notes are not clear. If you're sure you don't want to use your real email address, use bindrpg@posteo.uk instead.

Basic Usage

git gives you a lot of toys, but beginners will only need a few:

Make a new branch to play with, and name it something (in this example, your username).

git branch $USER
git checkout $USER

You can mess around here, making the changes you want. But if you don't like your changes, just reset everything:

git reset --hard HEAD

Tell git you've made changes:

git add -A

Explain what you did in a few words, e.g. add rule for half-swording, with a commit message:

git commit

Push your changes to gitlab, so everyone sees them.

git push origin $USER

Remember you are pushing your own branch, so replace $USER with a good name for your branch.

Names have power, and should never be treated lightly.

• Paladin Torvald (or was it Le Guin?)