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Gitless: A simple version control system built on top of Git

gitless.com

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Re: Gitless: A simple version control system built on top of Git

#4

Post by arximboldi »

hackpr wrote: post #3

Yes. Git is powerful, but sadly has deep problems in its conceptual design. This is the reason why even mid-level engineers don't understand it fully. Love this work!

Can you elaborate on the deep problems? I personally find it relatively conceptually elegant.

Re: Gitless: A simple version control system built on top of Git

#5

Post by fgonzag »

arximboldi wrote: post #4
hackpr wrote: post #3

Yes. Git is powerful, but sadly has deep problems in its conceptual design. This is the reason why even mid-level engineers don't understand it fully. Love this work!

Can you elaborate on the deep problems? I personally find it relatively conceptually elegant.

I think the main problem is that many developers don't think of Git as a DAG, so they don't really understand at a fundamental level what the operations are actually doing.

Once you understand this, Git really does become simple. All you have to do is map each command to the actual operation on the DAG.

This video really explains it quite well, it's the one video that allowed me to fully grasp everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ffBJ4sVUb4

Re: Gitless: A simple version control system built on top of Git

#6

Post by scrollaway »

hackpr wrote: post #3

Yes. Git is powerful, but sadly has deep problems in its conceptual design. This is the reason why even mid-level engineers don't understand it fully. Love this work!

Gitless doesn't change anything about git's concepts, it just abstracts away some commands. So if you think this solves the problems, they're clearly not "conceptual" faults.

I think this is important because people are so quick to jump on the "git is bad" contrarian meme. Git is a fantastic piece of work and the CLI has a variety of issues. On top of this, git is conceptually unintuitive, so the CLI issues make for a worse experience.

Re: Gitless: A simple version control system built on top of Git

#7

Post by Vanderson »

What I see this seems to be doing is auto-staging every file that changes? And beyond that it has a few aliases for some commands. Is anyone else getting the same thing?

I use git in my CMS which auto-commits a template file (text) on save. Which works great in a browser editor online. (ie, editing files remotely)

But I am not seeing an advantage to "not staging" with local files. What does this save when working locally?

Is there some disadvantage to staging I am not seeing here? Changing to "not tracking" seems like you removed the file from the repo, which in my opinion goes against the grain on how git works, and in a sorta bad way.

Re: Gitless: A simple version control system built on top of Git

#8

Post by paulddraper »

arximboldi wrote: post #4
hackpr wrote: post #3

Yes. Git is powerful, but sadly has deep problems in its conceptual design. This is the reason why even mid-level engineers don't understand it fully. Love this work!

Can you elaborate on the deep problems? I personally find it relatively conceptually elegant.

I compare it to 10-15 years ago, when functional programming was rather rare. Mid-level OO programmers would complain it was confusing and unfamilar, whereas in reality has beautiful and simple concepts.

Git's use of a DAG is confusing and unfamilar for many programmers, though in reality it's beautiful and simple.

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