Most of the time its people not understanding the tech they're trying to use and instead of spending the time to learn it they look for something they already know how to use or they'll pay someone to do the thinking for them which usually overlooks most of the company's context. I know I'm grossly generalizing but that's the trend I've seen so far.

They'll bash on Git for not being enough like SVN, bash on GitHub/GitLab for not having the same workflow of the previous tool. But will happily pay $200 an hour for someone to tell them what to use/do even if they end up making terrible decisions.

I think the case you describe is where consultants can be a net win, for the very reason you mentioned: dev departments at non-tech companies. These companies are usually happy with "its quirky but works" software since it gets the job done and allows them to focus on their core skills. There's nothing wrong in not having programming as your core expertise.

What I was describing is my experience seeing consultants and Agile brought in at companies where software development is their main area of expertise.

Exactly how everyone I know uses git.

OK so there's a new long complicated extremely labor intensive elaborate detailed process. "Surely there had to be a better alternative?" Yes, yes there is. Unfortunately there are many options.

Now the correct answer would have been simplicate and add lightness. Agile manifesto "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".

Instead, they found an overwhelmingly clunky and complex (their words not mine) tool to automate the complexity, or at least temporarily abstract it away, or at the very least replace one pile of complexity with another (larger?) pile of complexity.

Lets try a less controversial topic. Getting a pencil. All workplaces have different policies for office supplies. Order your own just like you buy your own clothes. Here's your annual office max gift certificate buy whatever you want. Here's a key to a supply closet. But here, we implemented a 15 page process involving teams of employees reviewing and documenting each individual request for a pencil in meetings. That's the bad news. The good news, is we replaced the original 15 page process with a 5 page process by installing an IBM mainframe, DB2, CICS, and writing a simple COBOL app that allows end users with newly installed 3270 terminals to request a pencil, and now we're better off than "ever before". Now most people would have handed out GCs, given out supply closet keys, or just trusted the employees, so you're going to get all kinds of semi-off topic blowback about how the COBOL program should have been the flavor of the month CRUD web JS framework, or instead of DB2 they really should have used nosql on the cloud so they can scale office supply request to all 100 employees not just a small team. But the real problem that everyone is squirming about is they're doin' it all wrong.

Saying that this is somehow more complex than updating a single commit and learning a whole new tool doesn't change that if you want to convince me, you at least need to correctly identify what's going wrong.

Perhaps if the author had specifically called out their perceived failings of the very latest GitHub pull request changes I'd have given the article more time. But unfortunately the justification given for switching was really shallow.

Yesterday I was looking for a way to refresh an old fork with upstream. I'm pretty sure there was a button for this at one point. I looked. Couldn't find it. So instead I had to:

  $ cd ~/src
  $ mkdir github
  $ cd github
  $ git clone myfork
  $ cd myfork
  $ git remote add up upstream
  $ git pull up master
  $ git push origin master

Github may be pretty-ish, but I tend to avoid them these days. They're expensive, and they remove useful features. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice can't get fooled again.

https://gist.github.com/xenophonf/9df09e47a8629bb789ffbb94c7...

I suspect that I'm probably doing forks on GitHub wrong, or at least I'm trying to use them in ways not envisioned by GitHub. In some cases I want to maintain copies of a GitHub repository for archival purposes (e.g., I'm afraid that the developer or GitHub will revoke public access to the repo), while in other cases, I want to institute a kind of code review process prior to merging upstream commits (e.g., I'm afraid of upstream doing something malicious). I will occasionally create branches in my forks, fix something, and send pull requests upstream, but I never feel like I need to maintain those forks---I'll happily delete branches or delete and re-create forks as needed.

I know many don't like the 'dirty' history, but I like knowing exactly how the updates made it into my repo.

But it's not the argument made by the author :-/

This is combined with most of the "historical record" really being worthless garbage: does it matter that you had to implement 12 fixups at various points and rewrite the whole feature thrice after requirements changed? Probably not. Does it need to be enshrined in the project's commit history? Absolutely not.

I imagine that people must be doing something involving git history which I simply don't have reason to do, or this "make your history pretty by rebasing" meme wouldn't keep floating around, but I really can't imagine what that activity might be.

For me, it's the ability to use git blame and determine which commit was responsible for a line of code and read the commit message about why it was added.

If you don't keep a clean commit history, you end up with a commit message like "fixing some issues based on comments" which affects at least 30% of the lines of code in the file. If I'm looking at that file 6 months after the fact, that commit message gives me no information about why those lines were added/changed.

With a clean history, you can use the same command and see the exact reason why a line of code was added through the commit message that added/changed it.

The code is the thing for me. And the less of it, the better.

In practice, I've never done this. I think it's that I work on a smaller codebase, or that I am 1/3 to 1/2 of the developers, and so it nearly always has seemed easier to read the code + tests, and poke at values in a debugger, than to use binary bug search. If I were on a larger team, or a larger project, `git bisect` might be more useful.

But I'm in your camp: I work with teams using git (and GitHub as a central repository), and a non-linear history has literally never been an issue. Even ugly graphs 7-10 histories wide aren't an issue. We also don't do pull requests (because we would we?).

We don't have a hard time with code reviews just using GitHub's commit history or even Gitk. In fact merge-commits often sometimes useful as markers of when the developer integrated his/her changes.

Admittedly, I'll occasionally do a rebase of upstream changes before I push if I know the change I made was small an isolated - but I certainly don't encourage other developers to do it.

I want my git history to be like my server logs, verbose. I can use tooling to reduce the noise and find what I need.

If you want to come back later during a git bisect and find out exactly when that bug that just took down your production application was introduced, then yes, absolutely. I'd rather look through 12 small commits than one monster one for that use case.

Look at it this way - a bisect cuts the search space in half with each progression, so you can double the number of commits being searched with the relatively minor cost of adding one more call to bisect when bughunting.

If you're tagging your milestones appropriately and otherwise practicing good repo hygiene, having n number of extra commits for any value of n is a feature, not a bug.

I'm not following this at all... what is it you need from this tool and why?

> Does it matter that you had to implement 12 fixups at various points and rewrite the whole feature thrice after requirements changed? Probably not.

Yes, code review is an invaluable part of the git history. It explains why you made the decisions you made. And having many small commits rather than 1 massive one makes it much easier to revert bad commits.

This is interesting - even places I've worked that have cared about commit messages have been pretty happy with the entirely content-free "Fixes from code review."

Do you summarise code review discussions in the commit messages?

> The whole "prettiness" thing seems like a bit of a fetishism more than about productivity.

When you say:

> I've never gotten an explanation that satisfies me

You have gotten explanations, you just pass judgement on those explanations and assume they are based on a fetish. You effectively wave your hands and dismiss them.

So, you are passing judgement based on your own admitted ignorance. And you go out of your way to hinder any investigation you claim to perform.

Whatever. You suffer for your self-inflicted and self-admitted ignorance.

> If you add a new member to your team, they would have to fork the repositories on GitHub, clone them locally, make the changes, push to their own fork and then create the pull request. With Gerrit, you could clone the main repository, do your change and then push it directly to the same remote as you cloned it from.

The objection would be that you can always push to a branch and issue a PR from there in GitHub too. Those steps are identical for both tools in a professional setting.

There are reasons for Gerrit but this isn't one.

You do need to create the pull request, but that's no different than pushing to a special magical ref.

I stopped reading exactly there, I knew that something was amiss. We followed that workflow at my last job, it worked well.