Gitless: a version control system • Hacker News Board

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#111

Post by zajd » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

fail2fail2ban wrote: post #106

zajd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be though. That's like saying Linux would be better if they only gave you ls, cat and nano because vi, sed and xargs were too complicated. There is nothing about gitless that provides a decent experience (compared to git) and certainly nothing about gitless that has anything to do with operating at "scale". The truth is commands like filter-branch, rebase, cherry-pick, etc. which are notoriously difficult to u…

> That's like saying Linux would be better if they only gave you ls, cat and nano because vi, sed and xargs were too complicated. That's a rather condescending thing to say and not accurate or supportive of the view of git you seem to hold. > The truth is commands like filter-branch, rebase, cherry-pick, etc. which are notoriously difficult to use... you don't even have to use them. Until someone on the team _does_ u…

Here in the real world if you fuck up your local repo by running commands you don't understand there isn't a "git expert" to come by and fix it for you, in the same way if you make a VM and fuck up your local machine there isn't going to be a "linux expert" to come in and explain how to fix what you did wrong.

Part of the benefit of the tool is that you can blow everything away and restart. It's distributed, which means you CAN fuck up your local copy and there are no consequences. It's been years since I've had a repository be in an "unrecoverable" state and part of that is actually taking the time to understand what I'm doing as opposed to just crossing my fingers and hoping shit works.

The fact that other version control systems don't even have some of the power features git has is a big reason git is so popular.

Again, if you don't understand the more complicated commands, don't use them (although you should- they are incredibly powerful and worth learning about). If your team is forcing some bizarre workflow on newer developers that involves using filter-branch and cherry-pick all over the place without good reason, that's an organizational issue, not one with git.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#112

Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:39 PM UTC

heisenbit wrote: post #65

Git is powerful. While the underlying architecture has beautifully simple aspects arguing that the complexity of the git tool-chain is simple is similar to arguing that TeX is simple as it is written in a simple language. Git is managing trees of file-sets in a distributed manner. It took many generations of configuration management systems to get there. Git is bottom up. Understand the inner workings and you know wh…

As a tangent, I think calling git a distributed system is misleading. Git is primarily a history manager for a local directory tree that has commands to sync with remote machines. Having to type stuff like

  git remote add mothership ssh://foo@bar.baz
  git push mothership

in order to sync is not what I usually associate with a distributed system. The word distributed conjures something that's more like dropbox, where things sync transparently.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#113

Post by dahart » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #54

tiborsaas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's one of the best command line tools I've seen. It detects errors, gives you suggestions and you can get along with a few basic commands. Yes, there are multiple steps, but that's okay because it can't figure out your intentions. Look: http://imgur.com/xY8dKWD no verbosity here and this is 99% of my git workflow. Working in a team is more tricky, but you should use and IDE with built in git support. If…

This is not objective. Git CMD has terrible flaws that are easily spotted as soon as you start teaching git, because you can see people struggling on difficulties purely created by a bad design. As a professional trainer, here are the most commong problems: - git checkout does so many different things. Git check file, git checkout branch, git checkout commit all do different stuff, and don't get me started on the opt…

> - stashing is dangerous. I've seen many students loosing work with a stash pop requiring a merge which ended badly.

Yes!! Stash has a problem that it's attractive to beginners, and its easier than other commands to hose yourself. It's a separate system for managing changes outside of commits, I don't get it. They could have made shortcuts to branch & commit. Mystifying.

> What we need is a good UI on top of that.

Srsly. But, wouldn't having a consistent & clean command line interface enable that? I haven't seen a good git GUI yet, they are all crippled because they stick to git's terminology. None of the UIs have been able to escape the foundation of the git command line, and I'm starting to think it's not possible.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#114

Post by novaleaf » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:43 PM UTC

rakpol wrote: post #110

dahart wrote: post #109

My criteria for whether an interface to git is truly easier is whether artists can use it. I've worked in games alongside artists, with everyone using Perforce. At some point we switched to Perforce for the art, and git for the programmers, with a big janky glue system in-between. Git couldn't really handle all the binary assets, and the artists couldn't really handle git, so it made sense. When we switched, it also…

Re. GUIs for git, have you taken a look at GitKraken [1]? I haven't had the chance to put it through its paces, but it looks pretty good. [1]: https://www.gitkraken.com/

I recently switched to GitKraken from SourceTree. SourceTree has better features and workflow, but SourceTree performance is very VERY terrible. I'm talking 2+ minutes to wait for some operations to complete.

Not sure why GitKraken makes it so hard to add remote repositories and doesn't allow auto-push, and other niceties. But I use it for normal checkin / branch switching workflows and it's great.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#115

Post by ajkjk » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:44 PM UTC

popmystack wrote: post #63

This seems extremely pointless. At worst, this seems like the Gitless team doesn't understand what Git is doing internally, which is a pretty dangerous state to be in when you're trying to "improve" something. Git as a whole: * Makes it really hard for you to do something you really shouldn't be doing * Forces you to stay "clean" and guides you to working well with other repository copies (i.e. the whole point of Git…

You have such a toxic and arrogant attitude about people trying to make the world a better place. It's shameful.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#116

Post by dahart » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:45 PM UTC

rakpol wrote: post #110

dahart wrote: post #109

My criteria for whether an interface to git is truly easier is whether artists can use it. I've worked in games alongside artists, with everyone using Perforce. At some point we switched to Perforce for the art, and git for the programmers, with a big janky glue system in-between. Git couldn't really handle all the binary assets, and the artists couldn't really handle git, so it made sense. When we switched, it also…

Re. GUIs for git, have you taken a look at GitKraken [1]? I haven't had the chance to put it through its paces, but it looks pretty good. [1]: https://www.gitkraken.com/

I have. I've used all of the git GUIs. None are as good as p4v as far as a GUI goes, and none are particularly usable by artists. Especially powerful in p4v is the timelapse view, which nothing in any git client comes close to approaching.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#117

Post by fail2fail2ban » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:45 PM UTC

zajd wrote: post #111

fail2fail2ban wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's like saying Linux would be better if they only gave you ls, cat and nano because vi, sed and xargs were too complicated. That's a rather condescending thing to say and not accurate or supportive of the view of git you seem to hold. > The truth is commands like filter-branch, rebase, cherry-pick, etc. which are notoriously difficult to use... you don't even have to use them. Until someone on the team _does_ u…

Here in the real world if you fuck up your local repo by running commands you don't understand there isn't a "git expert" to come by and fix it for you, in the same way if you make a VM and fuck up your local machine there isn't going to be a "linux expert" to come in and explain how to fix what you did wrong. Part of the benefit of the tool is that you can blow everything away and restart. It's distributed, which me…

Your points would be more salient if you could make them without falling back on profanity.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#118

Post by douche » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #109

My criteria for whether an interface to git is truly easier is whether artists can use it. I've worked in games alongside artists, with everyone using Perforce. At some point we switched to Perforce for the art, and git for the programmers, with a big janky glue system in-between. Git couldn't really handle all the binary assets, and the artists couldn't really handle git, so it made sense. When we switched, it also…

As far as version-controlling art, I'd lean towards a system where checking a file out locks it from any other concurrent modifications. Unfortunately, trying to merge concurrent changes into an image file, for instance, is just about impossible.

It's almost as bad trying to work with MS Office file types - I wish I could get people on my team to use something else that is more VCS friendly, like HTML or Markdown, but that's an uphill battle. Even better would be if we actually used the versioning and collaboration features that are built into some of the tools like Office 365 that we pay for, but can't seem to leverage...

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#119

Post by caseymarquis » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

I think tools like github desktop make this unnecessary. I've given some people a quick introduction to git using the desktop app, and they were up and running in about 20 minutes. Sometimes something goes horribly wrong, but it's a rarity. I think the worst case scenario encountered was: "No one knows what's wrong, so we'll use a comparison tool and manually merge in the changes from this branch with a bad repo state as a commit."

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#120

Post by popmystack » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 3:49 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #115

popmystack wrote: post #63

This seems extremely pointless. At worst, this seems like the Gitless team doesn't understand what Git is doing internally, which is a pretty dangerous state to be in when you're trying to "improve" something. Git as a whole: * Makes it really hard for you to do something you really shouldn't be doing * Forces you to stay "clean" and guides you to working well with other repository copies (i.e. the whole point of Git…

You have such a toxic and arrogant attitude about people trying to make the world a better place. It's shameful.

Uh, what? You respond to my post with some of the problems with this system in a hyperbolic, confronting manner without contributing anything. They are not "making the world a better place."

Please don't post such non-sense here.