Live data from Hacker News

Oh Shit, Git

ohshitgit.com

231–237 of 237 posts

Re: Oh Shit, Git

#231

I find people are religious about being git cli purists and only interacting with it in this black box (the terminal). On top of that a lot of people stop learning git after add commit push pull branch and merge so concepts like rebasing and cherry picking are scary. In this day and age we have state of the art GUI tools that change the game and allow git users to see and interact with the state of a git repository i…

How many GUI tools support git's bisection search?

Just last week, I found out that GitKraken doesn't support connecting to multiple Azure DevOps organizations within the same profile. So my team now needs to learn git CLI anyway, to efficiently migrate our 30-odd repositories.

Re: Oh Shit, Git

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because standardization matters and the first thing to become the standard is extremely difficult to unseat.

But some of types of things have in fact changed, sometimes for seemingly trivial reasons. For example, the master/main branch shift. Everything broke when that change was made, but it happened and it wasn't a big deal. I'm not seeing the difficulty here. It seems that a more reasonable interpretation is that git has the type of interface that is hard to learn, but intuitive once learned.

The master/main shift was fueled by political correctness. If “master” wasn't a synonym of a word associated with slavery, it would've never happened.

Re: Oh Shit, Git

#233
post #4

Git is a reminder why even the best minds in software development sometimes really should talk to UX/UI people.

What I don't get is that the UX problem is not hard. I still like the underlying commit tree model a lot.. it's just some commands that are not clear enough (reset has 5 meanings and can backfire quickly). Maybe it's just retrocompatibility inertia.

I recommend you create aliases. I've got a 'git-squash' 'git-back' and 'git-update' aliases created, I almost forget they are not part of core git. Combined with scm-breeze that allows files and branches to be referenced with numbers... it's really fast and powerful

Re: Oh Shit, Git

#234
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it, though? I'm not so sure. Git has enjoyed overwhelming success, which would seem to empirically indicate that it's done something right in terms of design Perhaps the obviously wrong UX/UI isn't wrong? Perhaps UX/UI people aren't good at designing interfaces for experts?

Git has been successful despite the UI, not because of it.

I'm not sure this makes sense. Are we talking the core CLI, or about any of the dozen UI clients?

For CLI, it's easy to create any number of command aliases and scriptlets to have the exact UI you want..

Re: Oh Shit, Git

#235
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the difference is, honestly :( I believe you, but I see both online and nobody seems to know the difference and it seems to work. Shrug? Most of my git life is copy pasting somebody else's commands because the model of it is really too complex for me. I've given up on caring... it's easier and faster to rewrite some code than deal with git's commands. Same thing for node modules, lol. Delete the fol…

Two things to make sense of how origin/HEAD is working. First is that HEAD always points to the commit that you currently have checked out. So, for example, if you have the master branch checked out, HEAD will be whatever is the latest commit in master in your local copy of the repository. Second is that to git there is no difference between the originating repository and your own. If you had your copy of the repo fu…

Thank you, that clears it up! And probably explains why I've lost work when resetting other branches; I wanted to revert to the latest remote tip of their branch, not reset that branch to master, but I screwed up because of HEAD. Thank you for clarifying!

Re: Oh Shit, Git

#236
post #229
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but again, the number of people collaborating on Linux kernel development is truly tiny. I think perhaps you're over-estimating the network effect for VCS's -- having multiple version control binaries on your machine is low cost, and aliases can, up to a point, give you a consistent interface to them all. The highly sophisticated demographic of kernel developers would not have been at the pub insisting that thei…

Bitkeep wasn't free beer and its adoption was widely controversial, until Git was born given their change of heart.

Well it was a bit more complicated than that. (I met Tridge shortly after the fracas, actually.)

There were perhaps 5k kernel contributors in 2005, would that be fair? There's perhaps 20k now, I guess.

github alone has 80+ million users.

It's possible, I suppose, that the former is predominantly the cause of the latter, but it seems hugely unlikely.

6 years ago Larry released BitKeeper under an Apache licence. I still don't anyone who's ever actually used that.

Re: Oh Shit, Git

#237
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are bad. Some concepts like rebase etc. I still don't understand. In software we often go for further complexity instead of less. I think because most of us who are the lead developers are often the most intelligent. And we often enjoy these complicated abstract models and they come easy to us. However in satisfying our own intellectual vanity we often don't see how many we leave behind. Which is good for our ho…

I'm sorry if this sounds arrogant, but if you don't understand basic Git concepts like rebase, I don't think you're in a position to comment on the architecture of Git

Thats kinda the point :). I've read this many times, but schopenhauer in german is more readable:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/804115/when-do-you-use-g...

Post reply on HN