21–30 of 143 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://mercurial.selenic.com/
This may seem like a joke, but having used Hg a little bit, I do think it has a superior interface. The error messages are clear, the commands are intuitive. The command addremove is genius. But I still use git because I already grokked it before I learned hg.
That's the default of what git does even without a command.
The 'Only the Gods' one seems weird to me; maybe I just don't understand Git well enough, but it seems like that one's just a case of failing to understand what a branch is . A particular commit isn't made 'on' a branch, so to speak; it's just a SHA hash that has a particular SHA as a parent. And then a branch is a pointer to a particular SHA. So there's no way to know which branch a commit originated 'on', merely wh…
Has anyone made an alternative interface for git that tidies this up without drastically changing how you use git? Or would this condemn someone's sanity to the graveyard?
Mercurial is essentially git with a clean interface and drastically fewer workflows. If it weren't for github's existence I'd recommend hg to anyone. That said hg is the better choice for big software shops IMO, because of the lower training cost and because they probably won't use github anyway.
Considering more people know git I would assume the training cost for hg is higher.
A lot of these are just plain wrong though or have a good reason and it makes me sad because I know Steve Losh uses a lot of Mercurial which I think has a much worse UI. 1. Silence: you can't alias built-in commands — for good reason. You don't change the defaults of commands, that's just going to cause problems with scripts. Why is it ignored silently? For starters because new git versions can add a command that wou…
A lot of these are just plain wrong though or have a good reason and it makes me sad because I know Steve Losh uses a lot of Mercurial which I think has a much worse UI. 1. Silence: you can't alias built-in commands — for good reason. You don't change the defaults of commands, that's just going to cause problems with scripts. Why is it ignored silently? For starters because new git versions can add a command that wou…
Isn't that violating 'doing one thing'? (Your other examples in this point are valid, and serve to show how powerful building concepts on top of a few primitives can be, if confusing at times)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may seem like a joke, but having used Hg a little bit, I do think it has a superior interface. The error messages are clear, the commands are intuitive. The command addremove is genius. But I still use git because I already grokked it before I learned hg.
I learned hg before git and the experience of switching to git was shockingly bad. I'm comfortable in both now and the big thing I'd miss if I went back to hg would be git stash (and I'm sure there's a hg plugin for it).
What about the index? Or the branching (bookmarks kinda work now I think), or the better remote management?
A lot of these are just plain wrong though or have a good reason and it makes me sad because I know Steve Losh uses a lot of Mercurial which I think has a much worse UI. 1. Silence: you can't alias built-in commands — for good reason. You don't change the defaults of commands, that's just going to cause problems with scripts. Why is it ignored silently? For starters because new git versions can add a command that wou…
> There is just a convenience operation on `git checkout` that also changes branches. Isn't that violating 'doing one thing'? (Your other examples in this point are valid, and serve to show how powerful building concepts on top of a few primitives can be, if confusing at times)
Yes. But that violation would also be there if `git branch` would checkout. And in that sense, what's more odd "git checkout -b new-branch" or "git branch --checkout new-branch"?
A lot of these are just plain wrong though or have a good reason and it makes me sad because I know Steve Losh uses a lot of Mercurial which I think has a much worse UI. 1. Silence: you can't alias built-in commands — for good reason. You don't change the defaults of commands, that's just going to cause problems with scripts. Why is it ignored silently? For starters because new git versions can add a command that wou…
Ah, nothing like pointing out someone else's flaws to feel better about your own. Git is powerful but hard to learn and is often not intuitive. Knowing Hg also has issues doesn't help me when I'm trying to use git.
A lot of these are just plain wrong though or have a good reason and it makes me sad because I know Steve Losh uses a lot of Mercurial which I think has a much worse UI. 1. Silence: you can't alias built-in commands — for good reason. You don't change the defaults of commands, that's just going to cause problems with scripts. Why is it ignored silently? For starters because new git versions can add a command that wou…
2. `git checkout -- somefile.py` does not have anything to do with checking out a revision. It changes a file's contents, but doesn't change the parent of your working tree at all. Unlike `git checkout -b` which is inconsistent for convenience like you mentioned, the "make file x look like it was in rev y" function here is unique to git checkout as far as I can tell. Then again this is git, so there's probably at least four other ways to do this with cryptic plumbing commands.
3. I like Mercurial's named branches because I don't need to create a branch for every single commit. But even if you don't like them, the "record which branch X was made on" and "use that recorded information to group branches and such in the UI" are two different things. The second requires the first, but git could record which branch was checked out when each commit was made as some metadata in the commit, instead of dropping it on the floor. It would be a godsend when trying to figure out what actually happened during a merge.
4. `git branch` doesn't show you the current branch. It shows you all the local branches, with colors and padding spaces and asterisks and crap. What if you want the current branch in your prompt? Or just want to grab it in a script? Your choices are "pipe to grep and sed" or "use this ugly-ass rev-parse thing" instead of "git branch --current".
Git's UI is still abysmal. Mercurial preserves more data (branches), gives you the same power as Git and has a UI where "--help x", "-h x", "help x", "x -h", and "x --help" all do the same thing (pop quiz: how many different things does git do for those? hint: it's more than two).
A lot of these are just plain wrong though or have a good reason and it makes me sad because I know Steve Losh uses a lot of Mercurial which I think has a much worse UI. 1. Silence: you can't alias built-in commands — for good reason. You don't change the defaults of commands, that's just going to cause problems with scripts. Why is it ignored silently? For starters because new git versions can add a command that wou…
If you see each of these stories as criticism's about git, then you are the novice. Once you receive enlightenment on each story you will realize why each story is not criticism--you will see the error of the reasoning of the novice in the story and you will understand why Master Git's actions make sense.