Using version control git for ROS development

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We use git for our version control and this is what we do:

1. First, make sure you get familiar with the concepts of repositories, stacks, and packages as they pertain to ROS:
   http://www.ros.org/wiki/Repositories
   http://www.ros.org/wiki/Stacks
   http://www.ros.org/wiki/Packages
2. Name your repository. The accepted model is to name it something along the lines of "foo-ros-pkg". If the repo is part of an institution, like a company or a university, "foo" can be the name of that group. If it's a personal repo, "foo" can be your initials, last name, or something similar.
3. Name your stacks and packages. You can check out here for more info:
   http://www.ros.org/wiki/Naming
   You should try to be descriptive as to what the stack/package is, and also try not to clash with other existing stacks, in case you decide to make your code public at some point.
4. Organize your directories. Your repository should contain the stacks, and the stacks contain the packages. As an example: our repo is called "ccny-ros-pkg". It has a "scan_tools" stack, which in turn contains a "canonical_scan_matcher" package. So I store it in:
   

   ~/ros/ccny-ros-pkg/scan_tools/canonical_scan_matcher

   Note that "~/ros" does not have to be your ROS installation directory. As the other answers pointed out, you usually install ROS binaries in "/opt/ros", but you can keep your development work in "~/ros", where you have write permissions.
5. Prepend "~/ros/" to ROS_PACKAGE_PATH in your setup.sh file, located in your ros installation directory. For example, mine contains these lines:

   export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=/opt/ros/diamondback/stacks
   export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ros:${ROS_PACKAGE_PATH}

6. Apply version control. Usually, you would put you whole repository under version control, ie, foo-ros-pkg. If you are using git, you can simply do:

   cd ~/ros/foo-ros-pkg
   git init
   

   This will create a hidden ".git" folder inside "foo-ros-pkg". It will contain your local repository.

Hope this helps!
Ivan

I use git for most of my ROS work and have no problems with it.

Some tips:

1. Don't keep your packages in /opt/ros... I like to keep my development code in a folder like ~/code/dev_stacks and then I prepend that path to ROS_PACKAGE_PATH in my .bashrc. See the Setup page on the CWRU-ROS-PKG wiki for directions on how I had students in our Mobile Robotics course checkout the cwru-ros-pkg.
2. There is no need to change the directory name on your package to include the .git extension. Git URLS are the only place the .git extension to the repo name is actually used to my knowledge.

Once everything is configured, you may also use rosinstall with git in creating a *.rosinstall file. If you publish it on the web http:/mysite/mystack.rosinstall user will be able to install the stack easily. Here is the orocos_toolchain_ros example :

orocos_toolchain_ros.rosinstall: - git: local-name: orocos_toolchain_ros uri: http://git.mech.kuleuven.be/robotics/orocos_toolchain_ros.git

rosinstall [path] http:/mysite/mystack.rosinstall