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Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

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Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#91

Post by layer8 »

NKCSS wrote: post #54
mabbo wrote: post #44

I said this in another comment recently about git, but I find it odd that even after a decade of using git as a mandatory part of my professional life, I'm still learning new things. That's maybe not a good sign about the usability of git. That `@{'3 days ago'}` thing? That's incredible. Why didn't I know about that 8 years ago? Why wasn't it obvious, intuitive to me that this was possible? git is brilliant and I lov…

GIT is just the new Regex. Everybody uses it, most have no clue how it works and just copy/pasts stuff from other places/repeats the same little trick

Regex is much simpler than Git, but also the different regex implementations in use have a lot of subtle and less subtle differences, whereas there is roughly only one Git.

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#92

Post by stu2b50 »

lelandfe wrote: post #31
codingdave wrote: post #30

> It is really hard to lose stuff If that stuff is committed. Maybe I'm stating the obvious but conversations seem to revolve so much around finding stuff and merging stuff that my favorite use of git isn't talked about as much -- throwing stuff away. A commit is your save point - once made, you can basically code risk-free, knowing you can always go back to that save point. Try new things, thrash your code, don't st…

As a corollary: cheap branches are wonderful. The workflow I teach the newbies at my job is to just do a quick `git checkout -b tempbranch` when trying out: complicated rebasing, cherry-picking commits, whatever. Do your thing on that temporary branch. Did the thing work? Hell yeah. `git checkout - && git reset --hard tempbranch`. Presto magic, your old branch is now a perfect replica of tempbranch . It's as if you d…

Those are pretty much the same thing. Branches work for that purpose because commits are immutable - the branch just saves you from having to remember the hash. A tag would also work in this case.

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#93

Post by greggyb »

cassianoleal wrote: post #80
rjmunro wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always tell people the `-m` flag of `git commit` is only ever to be used in scripts. Let git open an editor and write your multi-line message there. Look at the comments telling you which files have been changed. Even better than using `git add` and `git commit` is to use `git gui` to add and commit files. The (standard) GUI is not to help beginners, it is to make you a more effective user of git. Note there are ot…

What's `git gui`? $ git gui git: 'gui' is not a git command. See 'git --help'. The most similar commands are ci gc grep init lg80 pull push

Your package manager seems not to include it. `git gui` is available in the standard Windows installer for git. The package on Ubuntu 20.04 seems to not include the gui.

As noted on git website, there are two GUIs that are in-tree -- native components of the project. https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#94

Post by layer8 »

maicro wrote: post #71
stackbutterflow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find regex easier to write than to read. I never copy them from stackoverflow because I'm worried it does some weird magic that I don't want. Instead I build them against one or more examples.

I can highly recommend regexr.com for testing and developing regex patterns; paste a representative sample in the "Text" area and it'll show you how things match (and usually, crucially, don't match) as you change the regex pattern. I'm not associated with them, and I understand you don't seem to have any real issues with regex, but thought this would be a good place to mention a useful tool.

Using such testing you can only prove a regex isn’t what you want for specific inputs, and make a number of plausibility checks, but you can’t prove it is what you want for all inputs. For that you need to do the reasoning on the expression as if you had built it yourself.

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#95

Post by snarfy »

mabbo wrote: post #44

I said this in another comment recently about git, but I find it odd that even after a decade of using git as a mandatory part of my professional life, I'm still learning new things. That's maybe not a good sign about the usability of git. That `@{'3 days ago'}` thing? That's incredible. Why didn't I know about that 8 years ago? Why wasn't it obvious, intuitive to me that this was possible? git is brilliant and I lov…

It's vindicating to see the general response in this thread vs threads about git a decade ago, where everybody defended git and decreed all of us simpletons just don't understand it enough.

Oh we do, and we understand how most of it is a flaming trash pile.

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#96

Post by layer8 »

praptak wrote: post #16

I love this quote from Part I: "Git has an elegant and powerful underlying model based on a few simple concepts: 1. Commits are immutable snapshots of the repository 2. Branches are named sequences of commits 3. Every object has a unique ID, derived from its content Built atop this elegant system is a flaming trash pile. "

Items 1 and 2 are somewhat misleading.

Commits are only immutable in the sense that the same commit hash will (with huge likelihood) always refer to the same commit history. But they are not immutable in the sense that you couldn’t change the history of e.g. a branch. Other VCSs actually offer more immutability than Git here.

Branches are sequences of commits only up to the last merge, because they are really just labels on branch tips. In other VCSs, branches are truly linked with each commit of a sequence.

Meaning, when you’re familiar with such a VCS, reading items 1 and 2 may lead you to think “well, that’s what I know and expect from a VCS”, whereas really it is a bit different in Git.

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#97

Post by Tijdreiziger »

pif wrote: post #67
stackbutterflow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find regex easier to write than to read. I never copy them from stackoverflow because I'm worried it does some weird magic that I don't want. Instead I build them against one or more examples.

> I find regex easier to write than to read. There is nothing new under the sun. Joel, 22 years ago: There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it. https://www.joel…

And the corollary: since code is harder to read than write, steer clear of writing clever code where simple code would suffice, as the clever code will be much harder to read.

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#98

Post by stu2b50 »

layer8 wrote: post #96
praptak wrote: post #16

I love this quote from Part I: "Git has an elegant and powerful underlying model based on a few simple concepts: 1. Commits are immutable snapshots of the repository 2. Branches are named sequences of commits 3. Every object has a unique ID, derived from its content Built atop this elegant system is a flaming trash pile. "

Items 1 and 2 are somewhat misleading. Commits are only immutable in the sense that the same commit hash will (with huge likelihood) always refer to the same commit history. But they are not immutable in the sense that you couldn’t change the history of e.g. a branch. Other VCSs actually offer more immutability than Git here. Branches are sequences of commits only up to the last merge, because they are really just la…

> But they are not immutable in the sense that you couldn’t change the history of e.g. a branch.

That sentence doesn't make sense, though. Assuming from context that `they` = commits,

"[commits] are not immutable in the sense you couldn't change the history of a branch"

Branches and tags are mutable - they're just pointers to commits - but that doesn't change whether or not commits are immutable.

When you "change" the history of a branch, what git is really doing is creating another series of new commits, and then making the branch pointer point to the new commits. However, because commits are immutable, the old commits are still there, and at any time you can go back.

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#99

Post by yakubin »

mabbo wrote: post #44

I said this in another comment recently about git, but I find it odd that even after a decade of using git as a mandatory part of my professional life, I'm still learning new things. That's maybe not a good sign about the usability of git. That `@{'3 days ago'}` thing? That's incredible. Why didn't I know about that 8 years ago? Why wasn't it obvious, intuitive to me that this was possible? git is brilliant and I lov…

I don't think the fact that you keep discovering features is a bad sign for a tool like git. It would be a bad sign if you kept discovering new footguns in the features you use (there is a fair bit of software like that).

I'm 25 and a couple weeks ago I discovered a new way to use a knife to prepare a fish, even though I've been doing that all my life. I don't think knives or fish have bad UX, even though I keep discovering new ways to use knives on fish. What's important is that I don't keep discovering new ways to hurt myself with knives.

Re: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)

#100

Post by EastSmith »

NKCSS wrote: post #54
mabbo wrote: post #44

I said this in another comment recently about git, but I find it odd that even after a decade of using git as a mandatory part of my professional life, I'm still learning new things. That's maybe not a good sign about the usability of git. That `@{'3 days ago'}` thing? That's incredible. Why didn't I know about that 8 years ago? Why wasn't it obvious, intuitive to me that this was possible? git is brilliant and I lov…

GIT is just the new Regex. Everybody uses it, most have no clue how it works and just copy/pasts stuff from other places/repeats the same little trick

I use 3% of git commands and that's it. I probably use 3% of regex rules too.
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