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Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

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Re: Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

#51

Post by Spivak »

aardshark wrote: post #33
avalys wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have gotten a little better. But, try to do something off the beaten path in Git, and you may ultimately get the joke. For example: “two weeks ago an intern accidentally committed a file containing IP we’re not allowed to use, we need to erase it from the repository and all developer machines.” Have fun with that one! EDIT: I mean, try to figure this out from the official Git documentation ( https://git-scm.co…

Is Googling not allowed? This situation is pretty common, so there are plenty of SO answers and articles on how to accomplish rewriting history to erase it from the repo. Removing from developer machines is a separate issue and requires you to be able to coordinate your Devs. If you meant that it's not simple to work out from scratch what you should do without lots of reading and trial and error...that kinda goes for…

Yes but git seems to be one of those tools where laypeople seems to genuinely not be able to derive how to do complex tasks from first principles. Lord knows I can’t. If your Googling doesn’t turn up someone’s who’s had your exact problem you will have to burn a long time figuring out how to do what you want.

Re: Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

#52

Post by Spivak »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #22
umvi wrote: post #20

I just think of git as a graph and branches/tags as text pointers to nodes in the graph. Doesn't seem that complex to me... Maybe I "got gud" though and can no longer empathize with git beginners

Because that's exactly what it is, and it's not. When I explain git to newbies in this way, it's like something clicks in their brain and they just start to "get it" as well.

But then once you get the mental model you spend the other 90% of the time figuring out what magic incantations are needed to transform the graph in the way you want.

Re: Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

#53

Post by SkyMarshal »

jeltz wrote: post #8
throw0101a wrote: post #2

I ran across this little gem recently: > Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space. * Isaac Wolkerstorfer, https://twitter.com/agnoster/status/44636629423497217

I have never got all these jokes. When my job switched from Subversion to git it took me about one week plus reading a couple of articles to become more productive in git than I ever was in Subversion. Yes, version control is a bit tricky but git is not that hard to understand and was much easier than contemporary Subversion versions.

>I have never got all these jokes.

If you mean that literally, this joke is referencing another joke meme in the functional programming community, explained here: https://blog.merovius.de/2018/01/08/monads-are-just-monoids....

If you mean, you don't get why people joke about Git being hard, it probably isn't for most professional programmers already accustomed to some kind of source control, just perhaps to anyone new to it.

Re: Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

#54

Post by jeltz »

avalys wrote: post #25
jeltz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never got all these jokes. When my job switched from Subversion to git it took me about one week plus reading a couple of articles to become more productive in git than I ever was in Subversion. Yes, version control is a bit tricky but git is not that hard to understand and was much easier than contemporary Subversion versions.

Things have gotten a little better. But, try to do something off the beaten path in Git, and you may ultimately get the joke. For example: “two weeks ago an intern accidentally committed a file containing IP we’re not allowed to use, we need to erase it from the repository and all developer machines.” Have fun with that one! EDIT: I mean, try to figure this out from the official Git documentation ( https://git-scm.co…

I have had to do it once during the 12 years I have used git, so I seriously doubt that this is why people think git is hard. And I think that googling it would be fine in that case. That said: since I have done it once I could easily figure out how to do it again and it wasn't hard, just a bit cumbersome due to git's distributed nature.

Re: Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

#55

Post by andi999 »

booleandilemma wrote: post #37
andi999 wrote: post #27

Will read it, until now, for me,git feels like it tries to get in my way (probably because I think differently). I heard about fossil,( https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki ) does anybody have experience with it? Does it suck less?

I think there are 2 core principles governing fossil: 1) It wants to be the only tool you need to bring with you if you and your fellow developers are going to be stuck on a desert island. It’s not only version control, but also an issue tracker, and more recently a chat app. 2) It preserves everything you commit to it. Whereas git lets you polish your commit history before pushing, fossil keeps everything. You can’t…

Thanks. They really seem to have a bias against deleting (and not so good rationalizations):https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/shunning.wiki

Apart from that, did you try it, and was it smooth?

Re: Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

#56

Post by cerved »

nerdponx wrote: post #35
umvi wrote: post #20

I just think of git as a graph and branches/tags as text pointers to nodes in the graph. Doesn't seem that complex to me... Maybe I "got gud" though and can no longer empathize with git beginners

That's pretty much the gist of the article, no?

That's what makes it good :)

I had no idea why it took my brain so long to wrap my head around it. Maybe it was blissful ignorance, never sitting down and making a mental model of it. Always looking for a tldr version of doing things. I don't know exactly at which point things clicked but it went from bewildering to just makes sense

Re: Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

#59

Post by beermonster »

belter wrote: post #41

For the more knowledgeable on Git. What is the current status of the transition from SHA-1 ?

This [1] is useful to read. Sha256 supported (experimentally at least) in Git since 2.29[2]

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/811068

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/xmqqy2k2t77l.fsf@gitster.c.goog...

Re: Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

#60

Post by MarkSweep »

edp wrote: post #50
avalys wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have gotten a little better. But, try to do something off the beaten path in Git, and you may ultimately get the joke. For example: “two weeks ago an intern accidentally committed a file containing IP we’re not allowed to use, we need to erase it from the repository and all developer machines.” Have fun with that one! EDIT: I mean, try to figure this out from the official Git documentation ( https://git-scm.co…

I don't think this is even possible with SVN or CVS, is it ?

At least with SVN, the is one option that is pretty similar to git’s filter-branch: svndumpfilter. You dump the entire history of the SVN repo to a file, edit it, and then load it into a new SVN repo. I used this technique to pre-process a repo to remove large files before migrating to Git. The file format is simple enough that you can easily write a program to edit the stream.
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