Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
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Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
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Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#2I read most of this long article, and I found it useful, but:
It's unsurprising that people's mental model of git is incorrect. Git is not something people study at a conceptual level, it's something they learn recipes for in order to work on some project. Recipes like "how do I save all this work I just did" and "oh shit, everything is hosed, please give me a magic spell I can paste into my terminal to fix it".
I don't really blame people, since git itself does nothing to teach you how it works. Git it is the definition of something you have to deal with in order to do something more important to you. Some people want to dig deep and understand how the system works: it's nice to sit near that person and ask them for help sometimes.
Saying "you should really understand more about git" is like saying "you should really study the tax code, it's important and it affects you whether you like it or not." True, but deeply irrelevant!
Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#3That's the blog post I always wanted to write. So many people spend little to no time to actually learn Git, because "it's just a tool to help you doing your "real" work" (=coding) . Or because "Git is too difficult/confusing/broken". Or because "I don't need anything except commit/push/pull". I find those arguments somewhat true, but I still feel that people are missing out when they don't learn a tool they use daily properly. In best case, it makes them less efficient. In worst case, they get into "unsolvable" issues and/or pollute the Git history with useless commits, making blames more troublesome for the whole team.
Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#4hm. vexing.
I feel like this is mostly accurate, to my knowledge, but reading this:
> I do not claim that this way of looking at Git represents absolute “facts” in any hard and fast or literal sense. But I contend that if you conceive of Git in the way that I’m going to suggest, if you substitute these conceptions of Git for any misconceptions you might have now, you’ll be a much happier and more fluid Git user.
…vexes me.
“Think of git like bowl of peanuts and marshmallows” and other pointless, wrong, metaphors about how git works are a dime a dozen.
Yet, here is someone who is clearly quite familiar with git, and they go to pains to point out they are simplifying and may not be correct in their explanations.
Its good to be humble, but ffs, git is too frigging complicated if the best you can get is a “probably wrong simplified mental model of how it works so you can be a bit more productive with it”.
I dont care;
- a simple meaningless metaphor that lets you be more productive? OK.
- a accurate description of how things actually work? OK.
…but pick one.
What I do not want is a possibly wrong complicated explanation of how git maybe works.
Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#5That's the blog post I always wanted to write. So many people spend little to no time to actually learn Git, because "it's just a tool to help you doing your "real" work" (=coding) . Or because "Git is too difficult/confusing/broken". Or because "I don't need anything except commit/push/pull". I find those arguments somewhat true, but I still feel that people are missing out when they don't learn a tool they use dail…
It is just a tool to help you do your real work and famously gets in the way. You use SVN and it covers 99% of use cases much more simply than Git manages.
Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#6I read most of this long article, and I found it useful, but: It's unsurprising that people's mental model of git is incorrect. Git is not something people study at a conceptual level, it's something they learn recipes for in order to work on some project. Recipes like "how do I save all this work I just did" and "oh shit, everything is hosed, please give me a magic spell I can paste into my terminal to fix it". I do…
In a literal sense, sure, git _the tool_ doesn't do much, though I think this is slowly improving as it evolves. For example, there is an experimental `git switch` command[1] under development to provide a simpler interface for changing branches. For me, the biggest leap in developing my own mental model was reading Scott Chacon's book Pro Git, and that is now available online for free on the official Git website[2].
Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#7I read most of this long article, and I found it useful, but: It's unsurprising that people's mental model of git is incorrect. Git is not something people study at a conceptual level, it's something they learn recipes for in order to work on some project. Recipes like "how do I save all this work I just did" and "oh shit, everything is hosed, please give me a magic spell I can paste into my terminal to fix it". I do…
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Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#8hm. vexing. I feel like this is mostly accurate, to my knowledge, but reading this: > I do not claim that this way of looking at Git represents absolute “facts” in any hard and fast or literal sense. But I contend that if you conceive of Git in the way that I’m going to suggest, if you substitute these conceptions of Git for any misconceptions you might have now, you’ll be a much happier and more fluid Git user. …vex…
And it's not even necessary -- the git data model is simple. It's simple enough that you can generate valid commits in about a page lines of python, with no libraries. The rest is just packing files for efficiency, and finding the difference between hash lists for syncing and pulling.
The command line interface to git is insanely complicated, confusing, and unnecessarily difficult to use, but this isn't a result of the git data model. It's definitely possible, to give a complete and accurate description of the data model, even using examples from `git cat-file` to walk through the commit history by hand.
I've also got a simple demo that generates a complete repo with a commit. You can manipulate the resulting repo from git. There are 65 non-comment lines of code.
Here it is: https://orib.dev/ugit.py
Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#9Ugh. So many concepts. So many things to remember. Why? Git is simple. SIMPLE. But only, IMO, if you go bottom-up and not top-down. There are only 6 critical concepts in Git and each is simple enough to be described in a single sentence.
1. Commits are immutable blobs that have one or more parents. Graphs, not trees. Anyone who uses trees for git commits misses the whole point and makes their (and their collaborators) lives complicated.
2. Tags are (mostly, best practice) immutable pointers to commits. Tag are "this is this thing FOREVER*."
3. Branches are named, mutable (by design) pointers to commits. Branches are "this is this thing FOR NOW. Later it'll be something else."
4. HEAD is special "branch" that moves around automatically.
5. Origin is the local snapshot of the remote. Origin is "what did it look like when I last looked."
6. (fundamental but not critical) Remote is the current remote state (queried by RPC).
7. Index (aka stage) is where you put changes you want to make into commits. (this is somewhat simplified). Index is "My current and immediate plan. Scrub as needed."
That's (mostly, for non advanced use cases) it. Everything else are commands to query or manipulate the various state. Every action (until it becomes instinctual knowledge) should follow the same recipe: 1. Figure out the current state (current commit graph, relevant branches). 2. Figure out the target state (desired commit graph, new branches positions). 3. Mutate using ANY command you want.
I think that's the issue really. Inexperienced dev / people who don't understand git look at commands as "this is how to do a thing". No. In Git there isn't "how to do the thing". It's exactly like writing code - so many ways to achieve the goal, just choose your own. It might be efficient and elegant, or bumbling and ugly, but it'll get there.
Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions
#10Related: A video[0] from The Missing Semester, a course by CSAIL MIT, which covers Git in one of it's lectures. Personally, the entire series is a must watch, but if time is limited, the first 20 odd minutes give an absolutely fantastic introduction to Git.