Any reasons not to deploy "Git for Windows"?

[mrhcarlin]

I'm not at all familiar with Git. I don't know how it works, what it's really used for, or what damage it could potentially cause if deployed without implementing restrictions. I assume it is just an IDE with some workflow utilities. I read somewhere that you can integrate PowerShell into Git, which makes me very weary, although presumably with PowerShell blocked this would not work (one would hope!)

 

Personally I'd rather just not deploy the thing. Our Head of Computing is, quite frankly, a pain in the ass as she even wants VirtualBox and Uniserver installed in her computer labs...But that's for another time.

 

Anyone have experience with this? Did you or would you just put your foot down? Is it perhaps actually completely harmless and requires no work beyond simply installing it?

 

 

Cheers!

[danbuntu]

git is a version control system. It's used by programmers to work with code in teams and is pretty much an idustry standard. it's not an ide - but is often used with an IDE such visual studio.

 

It a really good thing for students to get exposure to - we're just rolling it out here fro our students.

 

It sounds like your HoC has some good plans for her students.

[mrhcarlin]

As long as Git won't open up the system to tampering because some whizkid finds out he can run PowerShell scripts with it, then I'm all for deploying it. It sounds like it's fine though.

 

And thanks for the explanation.

Edited March 28, 2017 by mrhcarlin

[pcstru]

It's not just tampering you should worry about. GIT is 'just' a version control system which will replicate 'code' repositories to the local machine. One issue might be suitable checking on the content of those repositories. It is not just clever programming that lives in files that can be put in a repository. Any file can be placed there by anyone. That said GIT is not confined to a particular service - you can use it against your own controlled repository, so the actual issues will depend on how it it is configured for use and what repositories the client is able to access.

 

There have also been security issues with some implementations of the client which allowed arbitrary code execution on machines.