Best practice for maintaining updated Git binaries (Git by Git) on Mac OS X 10.5?

Question

On my Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) machine, I have installed Git 1.6.0.2 using the git-OSX-Installer from Google Code. The installer installs Git to /usr/local/Git.

I would now like to keep up with the latest stable Git release (Master branch), currently 1.6.0.3.

Can I run "git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git" from within the /usr/local/Git directory, then Configure/Make/Install using XCode, or will that not work?

Basically I'm looking for the best practice to keep Git updated to the latest stable version.

Answer 1

I keep Git up to date on my Mac using MacPorts. I find that there is a lot of other stuff in MacPorts that I need as well, so this works well for me.

Answer 2

The script x-git-update-to-latest-version will compile and install the latest version of git (from the git repository).

It's set to use the current HEAD revision of the master branch, but it should be easy enough to add a line or two to git checkout the stable branch.

It installs git into /usr/local/git-v1.6.0.2-287-g3791f77/ (for example), then symlinks /usr/local/git/ to the latest directory.

You can set it to run periodically (nightly?), either via cron (which is extremely simple, but has some irritating issues on OS X 10.5.x), or the slightly convoluted launchd (Lingon is a nice interface to this, although to start the job running without logging in/out, you have to run the command launchctrl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/mylaunchagent.plist)