Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Git is too hard

changelog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 821 posts

Re: Git is too hard

#601

Post by baxtr »

Macha wrote: post #269
jariel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is I think objectively more complicated any other popular VCS, simply due to the fact it has much more in the design model. It's also more powerful. But the tradeoff is ugly within the context of the nature of the UI. Git is like C++, it has a lot of features, the UI is not well thought out and it creates countless corner cases. Git was not designed to focus on the core cases, making things simple. Git is one of…

Git is more popular because Github used Git and Github was better than google code or sourceforge. Bitbucket got like 80% of the way there but was always a few steps behind. Had bitbucket taken off rather than github (which is much more to do with the web UI and network effects than the underlying VCS), we'd all be using hg now.

Sounds like Betamax vs. VHS!

Re: Git is too hard

#602

Post by deeteecee »

That's a lot of points for an article that didn't say much. also, I question the author's experience of 10 years if he considered those hard questions to answer.

But point well taken, we want an easier and more usable tool. I definitely think the learning curve for beginners needs to be shaved off somehow.

Re: Git is too hard

#603

Post by earthboundkid »

rossdavidh wrote: post #410

I've used git for ten years, at half a dozen organizations (I'm a consultant/contractor). I have accepted that it's what we use now, so I use it. But... Git is the bad boyfriend of the developer community. If anything bad happens it was your fault. If you ask it to do something and it does something else, it was your fault, and also you are stupid. If you ever make a mistake, you will be punished for it with a long d…

> Git is the democracy of programming: it is the worst tool for version control, except all those other tools that have been tried from time to time.

https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2018/git-gud/

Re: Git is too hard

#604

Post by booleandilemma »

I've found that when I've seen people struggle with git they're doing something really weird that they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

Learn the core commands, keep yourself disciplined, stick to a workflow, and git is fine.

Re: Git is too hard

#605

Post by jidiculous »

gpderetta wrote: post #342
skohan wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Resisting GUI's is not a good idea. I disagree. In my personal experience, learning git took a lot of trial and error, but now whatever terminal I sit down in front of, I know exactly which commands I have to run to do what I want in git. When using a GUI, it's fine for the easy/common stuff, but if I want to do something more complex I have to figure out how to dig through the options provided by the tool to get t…

Agree with you. A GUI is fine (and a good thing) as long as it is just for convenience and discoverability, and it doesn't abstract git away, hide its power or try to impose its own workflow. IMHO, a good git GUI would show exactly what commands are being run (so it is useful as a learning tool) and their result and allow it being used along side the cli. I use magit extensively and it has all these properties.

Yeah I heavily recommend magit to anyone who can tolerate Emacs (which is unfortunately a barrier). It's allowed me to discover so many powerful Git features I would otherwise never have used, and provides a very intuitive interface that does exactly what you expect it to do. This is especially true of its wrappers for rebasing and history editing.

Re: Git is too hard

#606

Post by athms »

thdrdt wrote: post #50
dimgl wrote: post #6

I don't agree at all. Git is the simplest version control system I've ever used. The concept of merging, rebasing, cherry-picking, and resetting works so naturally that I'm basically going to expect this level of ease of use from any VCS I use going forward. That being said, I know there are some who have trouble with Git. But IMO it isn't because Git is hard, but because they don't have to truly understand Git to us…

Imho Mercurial is much easier than Git. I have seen team members who lost data with Git but never with Mercurial. I still miss Mercurial. Unfortunately most people moved to Git so I also moved to it.

>Unfortunately most people moved to Git so I also moved to it.

The Lemming Effect.

Re: Git is too hard

#607

Post by Spivak »

horsawlarway wrote: post #460
wpietri wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You might as well ask how to unsend an email. That is also a reasonable request. I'm unable to fathom the notion that if a computer doesn't work the way people want, the answer is for people to adapt to the computer. The whole point of computers is to do things for people. With physical messages, unsending has at least partial support. Before the mailman picks up from my porch, I can grab a sent message any time. I…

I think you're twisting the problem statement a little here. Asking "How do I unsend an email" is just as unreasonable as asking "Hey, give me that gift I gave you back". The problem is that, regardless of your intent, you've given something to someone and they own it now. You can't undo that without involving the 3rd party (Or breaking the law and stealing it, digitally for the email). And I want to be clear upfront…

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. The point of version control systems is to make developing software easier. It's a tool that exists for the convenience of its users. It's reasonable for people developing software to ask for the ability undo a change or restore a repository to the way it was a second ago. Telling a team of people using Git "it doesn't work like that" is unhelpful because it's not impossible for a version control system to work like that and the point of any software is to help them do what they're trying to do.

This doesn't mean that Git has to accept any feature under the sun and it might be that Git isn't most appropriate tool for teams that want such a feature. But there's nothing holy or fundamental about an implementation detail of how Git does things that makes their use-case hard.

Re: Git is too hard

#609

Post by rmtech »

wegs wrote: post #367
rmtech wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is incorrect. One of the reasons that we able to achieve so much with computers is that there is a separation of concerns between different areas. Requiring everyone to fully understand git is like requiring people who code in high-level languages to understand and apply chip design in their day-to-day work. Imagine if when you tested some Python or Java code you got an error from your CPU and needed to tak…

There is a minimum bar for programmers I'd want to work with. Fully understanding git, for me, is part of that bar. The problem is that many programmers don't know how fundamental git is: 1) It's like understanding the basics of databases, network protocols, or compilers. It gives a lot of insight to how things work in a pretty deep and generalizable way. How do you organize data, and why are DAGs, Merkle trees, and…

> A tool you use every day definitely falls into the category of Stuff You Ought to Know, in a way that understanding how quantum tunneling is used in an SSD is in the category of Stuff You Don't Need to Know.

I use an SSD every day though, as well as an LCD display and a laser in my mouse. So by this reasoning, I need to study quantum mechanics; it would only take a few weekends of focused study to understand the Schrodinger Equation etc.

These things fall into the "Don't need to know" category because we as a species have made very effective user interfaces to them whereby you really need to know almost nothing about their internals to use them.

The ideal version control system would work like a mouse or a monitor. Completely intuitive, just works™.

Re: Git is too hard

#610

Post by astrobe_ »

wpietri wrote: post #429
thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. The very first question: >Oh, I just pushed a change. I really didn’t wanna push that, so how do I undo it? Is a Github problem, not a git problem. You might as well ask how to unsend an email. If you don't know what git push means, you shouldn't be using it and are playing with intellectual property fire. The conflation of Github with git is responsible for a lot of confusion. Having Github be your first interac…

> You might as well ask how to unsend an email. That is also a reasonable request. I'm unable to fathom the notion that if a computer doesn't work the way people want, the answer is for people to adapt to the computer. The whole point of computers is to do things for people. With physical messages, unsending has at least partial support. Before the mailman picks up from my porch, I can grab a sent message any time. I…

> I'm unable to fathom the notion that if a computer doesn't work the way people want, the answer is for people to adapt to the computer. The whole point of computers is to do things for people.

If you try to do that too hard you run into the task automation problem:

https://xkcd.com/1319/

In other words, "make the computer do things for me" as a diminishing returns problem. This is what you don't get.

What works best is a user-tool co-evolution. If I'm not mistaken, this is one of the core ideas of the Agile manifesto.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan

Post reply on HN