Git is a Harrier Jump Jet. And not in a good way

Re:Git is a Harrier Jump Jet. And not in a good way by arantius on Monday May 10, 2010 @10:53PM (#1336698)

Wow. I'm surprised at the one-sided-ness of comments here at HN. I read the article and totally agreed. I've been trying to deal with all the complexity of working copy/index/local repostory/remote repository/other remote repositories, merging changes back and forth, and umpteen other things, for a good few months now. It's genuinely Hard (TM).

I have definitely done occasionally awesome things, like amending commits with small noticed typos before pushing, stashing is totally awesome, cheap branches are mostly convenient. But there's _so many_ layers, and nothing (that I've yet discovered) that lays it out in a manner that makes it easy to understand.

I've a lot of past experience with Subversion. I used SVK for a while, so I could get local dev branches and commits without pushing to the central repository. But git continually confuses me. Plenty of it is un-learning other VCSs (no, to get rid of that mistaken change, I don't revert the file, I checkout the file. revert is a command but it does wholly other things.) Not to mention the many names for things. Local, staged, cached, indexed?

Yowza.

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Re:Git is a Harrier Jump Jet. And not in a good way by steveklabnik on Tuesday May 11, 2010 @10:44AM (#1337977)

Personally, I think that git is hard to learn if you try to think of it in terms of your previous VCS. As you say, you have a lot of svn experience, so maybe that's the issue.

Really, at its core, git is incredibly simple. That's one of the reasons that it's hard. It's just a DAG of changesets, and every command lets you manipulate that graph, or give points on the graph names.

Anyway, I'd echo several people's sentiments here: http://progit.org is a really good explanation, and also fairly short.

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