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Git undo: We can do better

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Re: Git undo: We can do better

#181

Post by alkonaut »

I hate git passionately, but I still find it somewhat understandable. I understand what it does but that of course doesn’t change my view that its UX has the elegance and consistency of an early php draft that went through a document shredder.

Git has a nice elegant layer underneath though. The DAG of commits is a very nice model, covered in a layer of terrible commands, and a few rather unnatural abstractions like the staging area.

I think to effectively use it you need to work with your brain squarely in that lower layer. Trying to think in terms of sequences of commands rather than a tree of commits and references is hopeless.

The fact that the UX concepts (commands, working copy, reflog staging area, …) and the underlying model (graph) are difficult to reconcile is git’s biggest weakness.

The difficulty with which is models some of the most common use cases (centralized, often including a few large binary files) is another.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#182

Post by matheusmoreira »

grogenaut wrote: post #58
sebmellen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally I think it just needs a 3.0 where they completely rename all the commands so that they're really unified. I know there was pushback on this in the past

That would be nice but will probably never happen due to backwards compatibility. Breaking changes in git would be even worse than the slow switch to Python 3.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#183

Post by usr1106 »

fierro wrote: post #146
stormbrew wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

definitely agree, and I'm in the same boat. I don't even think the data model of git is that hard to grok at all, it's mostly that commands are very unclear on what they operate on and in particular people get really tripped up about how many levels of state there are (stage, working tree, local branches, remote refs) that they have to interact with. Like, I've had to explain a lot of times why you `git pull origin m…

can you explain the `git pull origin master` thing one more time here?

I don't think using `git pull` is a particular good way of working. A pull is a fetch and merge or a rebase combined.

If it's difficult to keep your mental model of some system up to date, I doubt that doing bigger steps at once makes things easier.

So

1. run `git fetch`

2. if the textual output does not tell you what has happened, run `gitk -all`

3. Decide what to do. Rebase, merge, whatever.

Of course if you know exactly what you are doing, pull can be fine. If you changed the repo yourself on another computer that is the case. Otherwise, how can you know your second step, before having even seen the data you are operating on? Well, it can work, but if it doesn't, don't complain.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#184

Post by dewey »

jahnu wrote: post #132
float4 wrote: post #22

> novice users are terrified of it. When they make a mistake, many would rather delete and re-clone the repository than try to fix it In my experience most beginners use a GUI like Atlassian Sourcetree or the Github desktop client. It's a lot harder to make mistakes using the GUI in my experience. I still really like this idea though; eventually a subset of the beginners wants to learn the git cli and that sure seems…

Can I give a shout out to Fork here for being another great GUI for git. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. Just a happy customer. https://git-fork.com/

Agreed, another happy Fork user here. I switched from Tower as it just got more and more expensive and added features I don't need.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#185

Post by approxim8ion »

oblio wrote: post #88
an_opabinia wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a single person I’ve met using git in the last decade has thrived using a UI for it.

That's a failing of Git. TortoiseSVN brought source control to millions of people. A good tool should be fully embeddable in a UI, 15 years after its launch.

We still use tortoiseSVN at work. It's crude but shockingly simple to use. Moving to git would be a significant expense just to train people not to break things and to get them used to CLI.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#186

Post by IshKebab »

lisper wrote: post #48
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 chan…

> The underlying model is beautiful, but the UI is atrocious.

I definitely agree. The UI is terrible. But it is learnable.

I would recommend using a GUI initially so you can learn what the operations are and do without having to figure out that it's not `git remote list` it's `git remote -v`; it's not `git clean` it's `git checkout . && git clean -fdx` and a million other paper cuts.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#187

Post by rjmunro »

lamontcg wrote: post #98
handrous wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if I push without first pulling, must it always punish me with a merge commit? Can't I say "oh shit I don't want to do this, go back and git pull"? This is a source of probably 50% of my "ah, fuck, time to undo..." moments with git, these days. I hate that shit. Muscle-memory gets ahead of me and I commit on a shared remote branch, which would be fine given our workflow except that I didn't pull first. What a p…

I guess I have `git pull --rebase` as muscle memory. I would guess there's an easy way to make git do this automatically for you via config so you never forget, but I just never, ever `git pull` Or: > git config --global alias.up '!git fetch && git rebase --autostash FETCH_HEAD' From: https://github.com/JKrag/git-up

git config --global pull.rebase true

You probably also want:

git config --global rebase.autostash true

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#188

Post by qq4 »

jgilias wrote: post #107
Jakobeha wrote: post #51

Any other recommendations for CLI tools? I've gotten kind of familiar with the Git CLI. But it took a lot of wasted hours and headaches to do so, and even now it takes headaches and extra time / effort to do certain things like rewrite history and "good" commits. I still prefer CLI to GUI but I wish it was more intuitive.

There's tig: https://jonas.github.io/tig/ It doesn't have too many features, but the main thing it aims for - a better repo browser, it does really well in my opinion.

I can second tig, it really helps me parse the repo.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#189

Post by matheusmoreira »

Hamuko wrote: post #78
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. Most people don't know how the Internet works and yet it's widely used. You don't need to understand the inner workings of git. You just need to know some commands and some basic concepts.

> Most people don't know how the Internet works and yet it's widely used.

Yeah. I've met many developers who have no idea what a cookie even is, people who have never read a single IETF RFC.

Re: Git undo: We can do better

#190

Post by woah »

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.

Sorry, I'm trying to get work done, not memorize an obscure set of incantations like some kind of D&D wizard. If the repo gets messed up, I delete it and reclone.
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