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Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

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Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#411

Post by imtringued »

tomesch1982 wrote: post #265
peteretep wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> way better tools I work with a group of people who all know enough git that we're productive, and a few of us know enough git to solve complicated problem. I've not seriously considered fossil or mercurial -- what are the top three tangible benefits I'd get from them getting our team to switch?

That is exactly the point. For git you need the ecosystem to cope with it's shortcomings and in addition some experts to help you out of the pickles this software gets you into. I mainly use fossil for personal projects. Whats nice about it is that it not only is a very capable VCS but also a complete project management tool with tickets/issues, wiki, blog, mailing list and user management. The setup is ridiculously…

>In addition fossil never looses data, unlike git which can easily destroy branches that are not pushed, delete stuff while stashing or unstashing, delete stuff when rebasing and so on.

I have created a lot of feature branches that contain useless commits which I then later corrected with a simple git merge --squash. Preserving those commits sounds like a drag.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#412

Post by the_af »

reagent_finder wrote: post #285
tomesch1982 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is neither easy not is it really elegant. It is useful for projects like Linux™ but for the vast majority of projects way better tools like mercurial or fossil would be a much better fit.

What? To use git you need to know clone, pull, commit, push. For larger projects branch and merge. Those fall into a lot of boxes that say "easy" or "elegant," and I really wouldn't hesitate to recommend git to a lot of projects, big or small, discounting specific needs, but I guess you've got some specific concerns that really don't translate well into simple statements. I've used mercurial only to get some external…

> To use git you need to know clone, pull, commit, push. For larger projects branch and merge

What if you committed to the wrong branch? What if you tried to merge commits from another user and made a mess of it all? What if you pushed something you want to roll back? What if you committed with the wrong commit message and want to fix it? What if you followed the policy of "commit often" but ended up with lots of irrelevant commits, and want to fix this so that it only has meaningful commits. How can you find who committed what? Or which branches contain a commit?

I know how to do all of this. But these are genuine questions a user of git will need to get answered, and git quickly becomes confusing/inconsistent once you're off the "happy path".

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#413

Post by wyoung2 »

kortilla wrote: post #218
brylie wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interface is arguably the most important part. I.e. it is a tool developed for humans to use, so would ideally have simple, consistent, and by extension intuitive ergonomics. Elegance of internal implementation is secondary.

The interface can be swapped out if the underlying storage is fine. There is nothing preventing you from writing a different front end where “checkout” doesn’t do all the things.

Which is why there are dozens of Git front-ends, fragmenting the market, reducing the benefit of cross-training within a team. "Oh, you can't do that in your TortoiseStudioCodeThingy? I just right-click and select Frobnicate File, and it fixes all that!"

Thus editor wars, language wars...

Alternative: a tool like Fossil where the CLI is sensible from jump so the whole team doesn't replace it with something better, uniquely per team member.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#414

Post by mschaef »

baud147258 wrote: post #343
mschaef wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If its interface is not simple and elegant, I don't see how you can call git simple and elegant, since it's how all users will interact through the interface. At least in my experience, the interface makes a lot more sense if you understand the underlying data structure, which does have a certain elegant simplicity. (Even if it doesn't work quite the same as traditional source code control systems. Failing to work…

>the interface makes a lot more sense if you understand the underlying data structure Except that I don't have to understand the underlying data structure to use a more basic VCS like Mercurial. What makes git so special that I would have to do that before being able to use it? And for recovery from mistakes, I meant stashing the changes somewhere, deleting the repository and downloading a clean copy to start again,…

> Except that I don't have to understand the underlying data structure to use a more basic VCS like Mercurial. What makes git so special that I would have to do that before being able to use it?

I don't think it is special. Generally after a while using a given tool, library, etc. I find it useful to dig in a bit and see what's happening under the hood to help understand why it works the way it does. git just happens to be the tool under discussion at the moment.

> And for recovery from mistakes, I meant stashing the changes somewhere, deleting the repository and downloading a clean copy to start again, which I had to do a few times with Git and never with Mercurial (I might had to do it once or twice with SVN, though).

I think we're talking about the same sort of mistakes. It's hard for me to imagine a case where you'd need to blow away a local git repository entirely. Worst case scenario, there should be good refs available in a remote that are just a 'git fetch' away. (If there's no remote, then blowing away the local repo is essentially just starting from scratch anyway.)

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#415

Post by hnrodey »

Unsure if this is just my hot take but...

GitHub is what mainstreamed Git to what it is today. Who knows what our industry would look like (with regards to source control) if GitHub never existed.

Probably still SVN and Team Foundation Server (shutter).

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#416

Post by [deleted] »

Ntrails wrote: post #332
alkonaut wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's simple and elegant as a data structure, when what people need and want is something that is (at least also) simple and elegant in its UX and most importantly VERY simple and elegant for the 80/20 use cases. For example a typical question on Stackoverflow is "How do I answer which branch this branch was created from", always has 10 smug answers saying "You can't because git doesn't really track that, bran…

As a very basic git user, about once a month my local git repository will get into a state I cannot fix. I cannot revert, cannot reset, cannot make it just fucking be the same as origin/master. Usually I accidentally committed to local master and then did a couple other things and it's just easier to blat and re-clone than work out how to resolve. Git is hard for idiots imo, and there are a lot of us

[deleted]

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#417

Post by BjorksEgo »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #408
tzury wrote: post #397

Bazaar and Mercurial are dying... Bazaar is dead, and Mercurial is near death. Linus wrote the Linux kernel and it became the "de-facto standard" for web application stack servers (and phones, and watches, and Chroemcast and all sort of `Internet things`) Linus wrote git and it became the "de-facto standard" for version control. If a world had 23 more Linuses, we would have full control over our SaaS and "Clouds" and…

Facebook[1] and Google[2] have both publicly stated that they are using Mercurial internally, so "near death" seems like an exaggeration. Mercurial has some significant advantages over Git if you want to implement a scalable backend for really large repos. [1] https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/scaling-mercurial-at-fa... [2] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...

Theres been plenty of work done to make git enterprise scale in the last year

https://vfsforgit.org/

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#418

Post by debaserab2 »

ori_b wrote: post #374
adrianmsmith wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing that Git does not track - I saw a web designer check in a huge hierarchy of empty directories which would be the structure of the new project that their team should work on. They were quite surprised when it didn't show up on any of the other designer's computers after a "pull". They had to go to the "Git guru" for help. Windows and Mac both have directories as a major fundamental concept. Everyone know…

I also can't figure out why it doesn't: An empty tree object should be sufficient to do the job. I actually had to write extra code in git9[1] to avoid accidentally allowing empty directories. [1] https://github.com/oridb/git9

According to this[1], which I think might be an official FAQ:

> Currently the design of the Git index (staging area) only permits files to be listed, and nobody competent enough to make the change to allow empty directories has cared enough about this situation to remedy it.

[1] https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitFaq#Can_I_add_empty...

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#419

Post by alexhutcheson »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #124
hamandcheese wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vanishingly small in number, but quite significant in terms of the number of developers working in them.

All of the organizations that have outgrown git will have such incredibly specific requirements meaning nothing but a custom built tool will work for them.

Objectively not true. Many (most?) are just using Perforce in an off-the-shelf configuration.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#420

Post by metabagel »

munmaek wrote: post #387
Ntrails wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a very basic git user, about once a month my local git repository will get into a state I cannot fix. I cannot revert, cannot reset, cannot make it just fucking be the same as origin/master. Usually I accidentally committed to local master and then did a couple other things and it's just easier to blat and re-clone than work out how to resolve. Git is hard for idiots imo, and there are a lot of us

With the amount of information available, there is no excuse: * https://rogerdudler.github.io/git-guide/ * https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 Also see stackoverflow. Git is a complex tool because it’s tackling a complex problem. I don’t see a way of making it “easier” without massively reducing what it can do. It’s like saying we should reduce a formula one car so people can use it without reading up on it, etc. If somet…

Git isn’t something which you can generally be successful using in a shallow way. Most developers will need to devote significant time and energy to mastering it. There really needs to be a better layer on top of it in order to make it easier for developers to figure out how to do what they want to do. Some of the commands and switches don’t seem to be orthogonal and/or intuitive.
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