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Git undo: We can do better

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Re: Git undo: We can do better

#41

Post by carlosf »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #30
eric4smith wrote: post #12

Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…

> The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. I once knew how it worked with moderate level of detail, but I simply do not need anything advanced for my day-to-day work.

Yeah that's my issue as well. I generally forget anything I don't use often and git is full of important stuff that you need infrequently.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#42

Post by Filligree »

handrous wrote: post #32
eric4smith wrote: post #12

Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…

I know (or, at least, have known ) how git works, in the way most people mean that (the data structures & on-disk layout, what a commit is, what a tag is, what a branch is, what HEAD is, staging, et c.). What I can't keep straight is WTF the commands are actually doing, in that low-level sense, which is a different thing, and there's approximately a 0% chance I'm ever going to use more than a tiny fraction of the com…

Take a look at https://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/?

Maybe you've already read it, but this is what let me grok the underlying data.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#43

Post by thatguy0900 »

eric4smith wrote: post #12

Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…

You're not the only one. https://xkcd.com/1597/

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#44

Post by Filligree »

deeviant wrote: post #10
sombremesa wrote: post #4

> Here’s my theory: novice and intermediate users would significantly improve their understanding and efficacy with Git if they weren’t afraid of making mistakes. Here's something that happens when people are encouraged to make more mistakes: they make more mistakes. The piece where people are encouraged to learn from these mistakes is missing from the author's equation. Without that, this tool becomes a crutch at be…

If your suggestion for making software better is to make mistakes so punishing that users are thusly properly conditioned to not repeat the mistake then... may I never use software you work on. An analogy in my mind is a "hardcore"(where your in-game character permanently dies if you die once) mode in a game. On the surface, even it's name suggests that a really die hard power gamer is going to want to try this mode,…

> An analogy in my mind is a "hardcore"(where your in-game character permanently dies if you die once) mode in a game. On the surface, even it's name suggests that a really die hard power gamer is going to want to try this mode, the phrase beckons truly a true epic gamer experience that will test the players skill to the utmost. But, you don't get that. You get people getting level 2 by killing only level 1 critters for 10 hours straight (or equivalent), you get a boring, sterile, slow progressing gameplay that is exactly opposite of what one might imagine going into it.

Well, yes and no.

Try combining it with a speedrun. You'll find you have to take calculated risks, and this can indeed add another level to the game.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#45

Post by dec0dedab0de »

pizza234 wrote: post #37
eric4smith wrote: post #12

Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…

Are you using Git via GUI(s)? Between my colleagues, there is a strong correlation between using a GUI, and messing up the repository. I agree that Git's UX is pretty bad (checkout overloading; overlapping between checkout and reset; push overloading... yikes!), however, I believe that in contexts where using Git is a constraint, stop using GUIs is the best strategy one can apply to improve the understanding.

I use the Pycharm/Jetbrains Git GUI. At this point I can't imagine effectively handling merge conflicts any other way.

EDIT: Also, I really like being able to look at a diff of every file before I commit, and easily choosing which files to include in a commit. Too often I see people on the CLI accidentally committing changes they didn't mean to, because there is no easy way to check everything at the last minute.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#46

Post by yxhuvud »

swader999 wrote: post #40
pizza234 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using Git via GUI(s)? Between my colleagues, there is a strong correlation between using a GUI, and messing up the repository. I agree that Git's UX is pretty bad (checkout overloading; overlapping between checkout and reset; push overloading... yikes!), however, I believe that in contexts where using Git is a constraint, stop using GUIs is the best strategy one can apply to improve the understanding.

I agree and limit Git Gui usage to read-only use, any mods to git I use command line.

Git Gui is a decent tool to compose commits, but for everything else I can't see myself using anything but the command line.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#47

Post by pulse7 »

eric4smith wrote: post #12

Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…

...plus git operation names are a bit confusing (pull vs. fetch, etc.)

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#48

Post by lisper »

eric4smith wrote: post #12

Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…

I understand how git works, and I still can't use it. There are three problems:

1. Despite the claim that git never loses data, there are actually some dangerous operations that will irretrievably nuke your work with no warning. Git checkout is the canonical example. This makes me very gun-shy about doing anything that I'm not intimately familiar with.

2. Git's merge is not smart enough to realize that identical changes in two branches are not actually a conflict. I've often ended up in situations where a small bug has been fixed in two branches which then won't merge without manual intervention. This is incredibly annoying. (To be fair, this is not unique to git. But because git encourages branching more than other systems, I encounter it more when using git in idiomatic ways.)

3. This is the biggie: translating the abstract idea of what I want to do into an actual git command is a black art. The underlying model is beautiful, but the UI is atrocious. The plumbing is great. The porcelain is cracked and mildewy. There are mysterious valves and pipes all over the place when all I want is one control for the hot water and another one for the cold.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#49

Post by gitgitgit »

pizza234 wrote: post #37
eric4smith wrote: post #12

Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…

Are you using Git via GUI(s)? Between my colleagues, there is a strong correlation between using a GUI, and messing up the repository. I agree that Git's UX is pretty bad (checkout overloading; overlapping between checkout and reset; push overloading... yikes!), however, I believe that in contexts where using Git is a constraint, stop using GUIs is the best strategy one can apply to improve the understanding.

I use Git via the GitHub Desktop client (https://desktop.github.com) and find it _very easy_ to use Git without issue by following a simple rule: don't be clever. I have branches, I commit, I squash merge via a Pull Request. No rebasing, no moving commits around. There might be workflows where rebasing etc. are important and certainly in those cases, using a GUI is probably not a great idea -- but it's certainly possible to use a GUI without issue if you keep your workflow simple.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#50

Post by zibzab »

sebmellen wrote: post #28
eric4smith wrote: post #12

Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…

For some reason people love to defend the obscure and strange and oftentimes objectively terrible Git CLI. I’ve found Mercurial much more straightforward for my (mundane and boring but prevalent) use cases, and I lament that it isn’t more widely used.

Every single time we are discussing git this comment shows up.

But why is one popular when the other one is so much better? I guess we will never know

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