I've been using it for over 7 years, and while I've memorized a bunch of commands and have some idea of what the commit tree is, I'm perpetually bewildered by some of its messages or the behavior of some commands - and the only way I can fix major trainwrecks is by nuking a branch (when I'm lucky, the entire repository when not) and copy-pasting stuff until it's back to working state.
Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
1–10 of 94 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#2This youtube made it click for me what is actually going on:
Git for ages 4 and up - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ffBJ4sVUb4
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#3I have not grokked git — it hasn't been necessary to. Understanding some of the basics, knowing enough of the commands to run, and figuring out which StackOverflow answer applies to my current situation is good enough. If I have to spend too much time knowing its internals and delving into its philosophies, then it is not a useful tool that lets me get on with my tasks.
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#4get in the habit of commiting every few lines you write, and before creating a pull-request(tm) use 'git rebase -i' and cleaning up into meaningfull bit sized history. move related changes togheter, remove (squash) things that didn't make it to the end, etc.
oh and never join any project that uses github and force squash-commits-on-pullrequest-merge. that is a sign that nobody there knows git or they don't care about code history.
edit: and yes, some rare times, rebase -i and moving things around will cause local conflicts. do not fear them. resolve and continue. it's all code you just wrote, should be easy and is part of the understanding process.
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#5When I realized it's just a DAG and you're just manipulating a graph and pointers.
Then it just became a matter of mapping git CLI commands to how they manipulate the graph.
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#6git is fine, one just needs to learn how to use it properly.
one has yet to witness the abomination that is svn, sourcesafe, or "software working on my machine" delivered by a zip file in order repent and mend ones ways
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#7This made it click for me: https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/two/git-from-the-inside...
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#8What's important to understand about git is that it allows time travel, and time travel enables changing history, and changing history is a really bad idea. Do not ever change the history without knowing what you're doing. In git, this means mostly rebasing and other stuff that messes with existing commits.
Messing with existing commits can be fine as long as you're messing with the only existing version of that commit. Commits that exist in other branches, have been shared with other people, have been pushed to remote, etc, should be left alone. Rebasing local, unpushed single commits in your one working branch is fine. Rebasing anything else will cause problems. If rebase is causing you problems, do not rebase.
Also: small commits, short branches, merge often.
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#9When I realized it's just a DAG and you're just manipulating a graph and pointers. Then it just became a matter of mapping git CLI commands to how they manipulate the graph.
Now I just have to learn what a DAG is
Re: Ask HN: What made you finally grok Git?
#10What's important to understand about git is that it allows time travel, and time travel enables changing history, and changing history is a really bad idea. Do not ever change the history without knowing what you're doing. In git, this means mostly rebasing and other stuff that messes with existing commits. Messing with existing commits can be fine as long as you're messing with the only existing version of that comm…
I just ran into this problem last night... if you shouldn't rebase after pushing to remote, how do you update a PR days after you originally created it to be on top of the latest origin/master and be able to resolve merge conflicts locally?