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Git is too hard

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11–20 of 821 posts

Re: Git is too hard

#11
The directed graph isn't the problem. I think people can deal with the idea that other people have a different version of the code from them. The parts that are hard are the horribly inconsistent commands and the complete mess that is how the staging area interacts with everything else.

Re: Git is too hard

#12

To be fair I have seen a company who had a dedicated git guy who was committing, merging, pushing whatever on behalf of the developer after nth time some of them screwed the repo completely. When I started learning how to use I had people telling me it is difficult, but were not able to explain why they think it is difficult and I started learning having this in mind and that made it unnecessarily complicated. I thin…

Some companies have a commit queue that takes care of actually merging a PR as part of their CI that mitigates this problem.

Re: Git is too hard

#13
Not Git is which is hard. Distributed systems are hard! So there is a really hard problem to begin with. One specific example from the post to delete a branch. There is no way to simplify that if you want to make a truly distributed system.

Re: Git is too hard

#14
post #6

I don't agree at all. Git is the simplest version control system I've ever used. The concept of merging, rebasing, cherry-picking, and resetting works so naturally that I'm basically going to expect this level of ease of use from any VCS I use going forward. That being said, I know there are some who have trouble with Git. But IMO it isn't because Git is hard, but because they don't have to truly understand Git to us…

I’d be inclined to disagree. I found the learning curve to be quite steep. When you’re used to having a centralised VCS hosted for you it can seem a bit of a chore to take on all this extra responsibility. Once you’re on top of it though it’s great I wouldn’t use anything else.

Re: Git is too hard

#15
This feels similar to the no/low code idea. Saying you want to make it more human and doing so without losing some of the power and crispness of it seems hard if not impossible

Re: Git is too hard

#16
post #6

I don't agree at all. Git is the simplest version control system I've ever used. The concept of merging, rebasing, cherry-picking, and resetting works so naturally that I'm basically going to expect this level of ease of use from any VCS I use going forward. That being said, I know there are some who have trouble with Git. But IMO it isn't because Git is hard, but because they don't have to truly understand Git to us…

The only concept that I can't put into my muscle memory is reverting changes for one file before commit. This is very easy in SVN but for some reason it's not intuitive git (at least for me), why there can't be something like `git revert filename`. Thankfully I have GitKraren that is helping me with things like that.

Re: Git is too hard

#17
I fully agree.

I particularly think about this because I had some conversations with people from the open science community. It's really often where I'd like to tell them: "This problem, you really want to use something like git. Although... it's kinda hard to learn."

There's a lot of workflows outside of software development or from people who develop software, but for whom software development is not their primary thing, where a version control system would be really useful. But our current state-of-the-art version control system isn't very well suited for that, particularly not for people who have a limited capacity to learn things or might only use it every now and then.

Re: Git is too hard

#18
post #4

Git is one of those technologies where it's super important to get a good grasp of how to internals work. Once you got that, it get easier to answer git questions for others or yourself, and to read the documentation or man pages, as you know what is happening. With how software devs use git, it's 100% worth it to read a good book on it.

What book(s) would you recommend?

Re: Git is too hard

#19
I would say that people only need to initially learn: checkout, add, commit, push and pull. Those operations cover most of a devs daily workflow (for most companies I've worked at at least). Anything else can be figured out/taught as needed, it's much easier to learn a new concept when you have a use case specific to you.

Re: Git is too hard

#20
post #16
post #6

I don't agree at all. Git is the simplest version control system I've ever used. The concept of merging, rebasing, cherry-picking, and resetting works so naturally that I'm basically going to expect this level of ease of use from any VCS I use going forward. That being said, I know there are some who have trouble with Git. But IMO it isn't because Git is hard, but because they don't have to truly understand Git to us…

The only concept that I can't put into my muscle memory is reverting changes for one file before commit. This is very easy in SVN but for some reason it's not intuitive git (at least for me), why there can't be something like `git revert filename`. Thankfully I have GitKraren that is helping me with things like that.

‘git checkout filename’ is the equivalent of ‘svn revert filename’
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