setting up git

Continuing my installation streak, I wanted to setup Git. I find this particularly useful when mucking around with a new coding language. As I'm making my way through what works and what doesn't, it's a tremendous help to know that in case I accidentally get too creative in my coding experiments, I always have something to easily fall back to. Now there are already lots of good discussions (e.g., see here and here) about Git vs other versioning control systems (VCS) (I personally used to use Subversion before switching to Git). As a Mac user, Git was already installed, though it was an older version (v. 1.7.12). Since I use Macports to do nearly all of my installs, I use these commands to update everything:

sudo port selfupdate         # updates macports
sudo port outdated           # lists which ports have a newer version
sudo port upgrade outdated   # upgrades the ports to the newer versions

Macports is usually smart about building/installing any dependencies first, but sometimes you run into errors. Also, there are a few ports that take a long time to build, so be patient! During my install, I encountered an error building arpack:

 --->  Computing dependencies for arpack 
--->  Configuring arpack 
Error: org.macports.configure for port arpack returned: configure failure: 
command execution failed 
Please see the log file for port arpack for details: 
/opt/local/var/macports/logs/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_math_arpack/arpack/main.log

To solve this, I first ran this:

 sudo port clean arpack 
 sudo port install arpack +openmpi -gcc45 -gcc47 

...and then continued running sudo port upgrade outdated

Note that others (http://mac-os-forge.2317878.n4.nabble.com/MacPorts-39476-arpack-s-openmpi-variant-conflicts-with-gcc45-td220687.html) have cited that they still encountered errors when building arpack. If that's the case, then try: sudo port install arpack -accelerate +atlas instead.
To check that the version was updated, run:

 git --version