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Gitless: a version control system

gitless.com

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Re: Gitless: a version control system

#181

Post by zajd »

Certhas wrote: post #166
zajd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not though. And posting articles that pretend like "git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD" is the best way to view what branch you're working on just makes you look dumber than you do for acting like git is difficult to work with. If people writing blog posts about "how bad the git interface is" and more time instructing newer programmers (the only ones who have any reason to complain about git) on how to corre…

"It's really not though." That's not an argument. Especially vis a vis the detailed reasoning behind gitless. In my view gitless has a superior experience without losing any power. Also no one is comparing git to CVS/SVN. It can stand miles above these and still have severe usability flaws. And I don't work with programmers.

It's not an argument because that Koans article is horrible satire that people are trying to pass off as a legitimate argument. I detailed in my post one direct example as to why that post shouldn't be taken seriously.

Now, if you have some legitimate gripes about git's usability I'd love to respond to them and have a real discussion, but Gitless doesn't make those arguments, it's just a wrapper around git (which could all be done with aliases) that adds an additional layer of abstraction for no benefit (or at least none that they've felt confident mentioning)

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#182

Post by flusteredbygirl »

StavrosK wrote: post #171
lbotos wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Version control is arguably confusing for beginners, but building a shim instead of learning the tool isn't the answer in my head. I always struggle with "lowering the barrier of entry" and it's not a "I did it they need too do it" it's more of a "Usually high barriers mean it's complex, and learning how to understand complex things is important." If this was some new novel way to version that wasn't just pretty git,…

I don't understand this rationale. Are you saying that Git's UI is perfect, and there's no improving it? It's not, and gitless does, indeed, improve on it. We should be celebrating better UIs over important tools, not saying "I made great effort to learn it, therefore learning it with less effort is inferior". No. If it does everything Git does, but more easily, it is strictly superior.

Git's UI will never beat Git's command line. Not even close. It may be easy, but the command line is far more powerful, and way faster. Basic git usage is around 10 simple commands or less, and it's not like it's not well documented.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#183

Post by detaro »

flusteredbygirl wrote: post #182
StavrosK wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this rationale. Are you saying that Git's UI is perfect, and there's no improving it? It's not, and gitless does, indeed, improve on it. We should be celebrating better UIs over important tools, not saying "I made great effort to learn it, therefore learning it with less effort is inferior". No. If it does everything Git does, but more easily, it is strictly superior.

Git's UI will never beat Git's command line. Not even close. It may be easy, but the command line is far more powerful, and way faster. Basic git usage is around 10 simple commands or less, and it's not like it's not well documented.

git UI == git command line in this context. I don't think anyone in this subthread is talking about GUIs.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#184

Post by detaro »

StavrosK wrote: post #173
weberc2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think those commands are remotely sufficient to work with git. You're forgetting about merging, traversing history, branch creation, remotes, grokking the staging area, etc. I'm sure I'm missing a lot as well, because those of us who have worked with git for a long time take these things for granted. And it does frustrate me that it's so complex, because Mercurial shows us it doesn't have to be this way. Unfo…

How are they forgetting merging, remotes, etc? The commands are literally on the front page. The only thing it doesn't have is a staging area, which is a conscious decision that I happen to agree with.

I think you missed that weberc2 replied to a comment listing 10 git commands "that are all you need to get started", not to the top level article.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#185

Post by flusteredbygirl »

detaro wrote: post #183
flusteredbygirl wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git's UI will never beat Git's command line. Not even close. It may be easy, but the command line is far more powerful, and way faster. Basic git usage is around 10 simple commands or less, and it's not like it's not well documented.

git UI == git command line in this context. I don't think anyone in this subthread is talking about G UIs.

My apologies - I saw UI and immediately thought of Git's GUI clients.

I don't think git's command line needs to be changed, though.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#186

Post by Houshalter »

flusteredbygirl wrote: post #182
StavrosK wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this rationale. Are you saying that Git's UI is perfect, and there's no improving it? It's not, and gitless does, indeed, improve on it. We should be celebrating better UIs over important tools, not saying "I made great effort to learn it, therefore learning it with less effort is inferior". No. If it does everything Git does, but more easily, it is strictly superior.

Git's UI will never beat Git's command line. Not even close. It may be easy, but the command line is far more powerful, and way faster. Basic git usage is around 10 simple commands or less, and it's not like it's not well documented.

Command lines have no discoverability though.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#187

Post by tree_of_item »

k__ wrote: post #102

Git is, like many professional tools, something you simply got to learn. But like with many professinal tools, you don't need to know everything to get to work. I don't know all Photoshop or Ableton Live features, but I can improve my photos or create songs non the less. With these commands you can already start your own repo and work on it locally: git init // crate new repo git status // show which files are change…

> Git is, like many professional tools, something you simply got to learn.

No. Why do people think "professional" has to mean "poorly designed"?

But then, the rest of your post seems to miss the point of this thing entirely. You go on to say that you basically only need 10 commands...which is pretty much the insight that lead to Gitless in the first place.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#188

Post by Grue3 »

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…

>What we need is a good UI on top of that. It can solve 99% of those problems.

It's called magit.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#189

Post by bobbyi_settv »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #44
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…

FFMPEG is a case of a tool trying to do too much, although, trying to break it out into separate tools would probably be worse.

Ffmpeg isn't a tool. It's a library to be used by programs who work with video and audio files. It has lots of features because different applications need different features.

The ffmpeg command line program is basically a demo that exposes every one of those features directly. Having it "do less" would defeat the point.

Re: Gitless: a version control system

#190

Post by masklinn »

lbotos wrote: post #163
skybrian wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite comfortable with git now but I also remember what a pain it was to learn. This included making mistakes and diving deep into git's internals to recover. The question is whether we should make things easier for new versus experienced developers? If switching to gitless became a thing I'd have to learn something new, but if it made things significantly easier for beginners, maybe my personal inconvenience isn…

Version control is arguably confusing for beginners, but building a shim instead of learning the tool isn't the answer in my head. I always struggle with "lowering the barrier of entry" and it's not a "I did it they need too do it" it's more of a "Usually high barriers mean it's complex, and learning how to understand complex things is important." If this was some new novel way to version that wasn't just pretty git,…

In my previous job, I taught darcs to a designer/graphics artist. It took about half an hour to go through the CLI, and after that he used it successfully and asked me maybe a pair of questions ever.

Now the guy was pretty technical (part of his job was AS development), but he was not a developer.

Darcs's and Git's fundamentals are not that different[0], but Darcs's CLI actually makes sense in and of itself independent from the implementation details, and when it diverges from the older standard (e.g. SVN) it's so that commands make more sense, not less. Meanwhile Git has taken pretty much the opposite tack.

Git's porcelain is a giant steaming roasted turd sandwich, no other DVCS has such a complex, hostile and nonsensical CLI that people tell you you're supposed to learn it from the storage model up and then it'll make sense.

Don't try to shift the buck to VCS/DVCS concepts, while they are complex Git's CLI goes a great way towards making them nonsensical to beginners and non-beginners alike. I routinely used three different DVCS before I had to take the plunge into Git, and it was still a fucking pain in the ass. And that's a problem at every level of resolutions, just compare the hot mess that is gitrevisions(7) to mercurial's (more powerful, more flexible, more readable and more regular) revsets. It's not like revsets are a genius's flash of inspiration either, "hey I'm trying to manipulate sets of revisions, how about I manipulate them as sets?" We're not talking turing award worthy discovery here.

[0] well they kinda are, but by and large the fundamental differences are irrelevant to basic day-to-day use.

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