How to install git on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

I'm finding myself using my old iBook whilst my MacBook Pro is being repaired. Since I'm taking a git class at RubyLearning.org, I need to install git again. The problem is that the git-osx-installer only works for Leopard (10.5), and my old iBook is running 10.4. This means I have to build and install it myself. There are a few similar articles out there on how to do this. Here are my notes.

1. I first downloaded Xcode 2.5 Developer Tools from http://connect.apple.com. It's free to join Apple Developer Connection, though it is a limited account. However, you will be able to download Xcode. Be sure to get version 2.5 as it is for OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
2. Next we need to install expat which is a dependency for git. I dowloaded expat-2.0.1.tar.gz from SourceForge. Building and installing expat with the C compiler tools is done in three steps: configure, make, make install. I downloaded all of the source tarballs to my /usr/local/src directory. Adjust as necessary if you use a different directory. Also, use sudo where necessary.
   

   cd /usr/local/src
   tar xvzf expat-2.0.1.tar.gz
   cd expat-2.0.1
   ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
   make
   sudo make install
   

3. Now we can install git. I downloaded git-1.5.6.tar.gz and git-manpages-1.5.6.tar.bz2 from kernel.org. I originally tried version 1.6.1 but it gave specific incompatibility errors for darwin ppc. So, I went back to version 1.5.6 and had better success. Again, building and installing git is done with configure, make, make install.
   

   cd /usr/local/src
   tar xvzf git-1.5.6.tar.gz
   cd git-1.5.6
   ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
   make
   sudo make install

4. The last, optional step, is installing the man pages for git.
   

   cd /usr/local/src
   tar xjv -C /usr/local/man -f git-manpages-1.5.6.tar.bz2

5. Then add the following to your profile (e.g., ~/.bash_profile): export MANPATH="/usr/local/man:$MANPATH"
6. Also make sure you have /usr/local/bin. in your PATH.
7. Open a new terminal shell and test the man pages: man git
8. Also test you have git installed and it is found in your PATH: git --version

Cloud computing is for suckers? Not for training and testing!

Perhaps you've read John Dvorak's article from last year, Stormy Weather for Cloud Computing, where he proclaims that cloud computing is for suckers. Now, while I wouldn't bank my entire enterprise on computing in the cloud, I can think of a few useful ways cloud computing can be a great solution.

1. Testing. This could be testing in a development or QA environment. More and more development teams are feeling the crunch economically, and are considering hosted solutions. Why not have a virtual lab? When you test away and get your system into a bad state, it is so easy to reset things back to a baseline state. But an even more clever use would be for off-site customer or usability testing. I have been in situations where we were doing customer testing and demos at a trade show, and getting the VPN connection to our SAP servers working was painful or inconvenient. Cloud computing would have made this easier, in my opinion.
2. Training. If your software environment is complicated (say, a NetWeaver or WebSphere environment), trying to arrange off-site customer training can be tricky. Instead of worrying about arriving to a customer's site with laptops fully loaded (and bogged down), why not use something like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud? You can have all of your images preloaded with whatever applications or server software you need, ready to go when you get to the customer's site. This training setup was actually used at Phurnace Software with much success.

What are some other uses? Please add your ideas to the comments section.

Photo by Flickr user ancawonka.