Compiling git

So, I like working on Drupal in virtual machines, and my favorite is to use Ubuntu 8.04, because it's got PHP 5.2.x, which Drupal 6 works with better than it does PHP 5.3.x. Unfortunately, the git that Ubuntu provides us with is from 1.5.x, which doesn't allow use of git clone --branch. And the git
instructions seem to require those. What to do? Happily, you can compile git yourself:

1. First, get rid of git if you've already installed it - sudo apt-get remove git-core should do that.
2. apt-get install build-essential
3. Download the latest version of git. http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.4.1.tar.bz2 works currently.
4. sudo apt-get build-dep git-core
5. tar xjf git-1.7.4.1.tar.bz2 (or whichever version you downloaded)
6. Change directive into the new directory.
7. ./configure
8. make
9. sudo make install

It worked fine.