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A comment on Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations. Parent comment

Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by chiefalchemist on Monday December 18, 2017 @05:14PM (#15956000)
It might not feelblike that big of a deal, but certainly there has got to be on any given day far more important things you can use those brain cycles for, yes? Low friction or not it's still friction. Friction that can be removed. Yet so many refuse to do so. There's something wrong with this this-is-how-we've-always-do-it picture.
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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by dasil003 on Monday December 18, 2017 @06:14PM (#15956331)
You make it sound like tradition or a cargo cult—it's not. Git is fundamentally better than most of the alternatives, but in my opinion it's misguided to try to slap a better interface over the warts. Rewriting the porcelain would be good, but I don't think it's personally worth investing in until someone makes an attempt that's good enough to get traction and significant mindshare. In the meantime I've already made the investment in learning git and it pretty much stays out of my way.
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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by chiefalchemist on Monday December 18, 2017 @10:45PM (#15957569)
Not to sound snarky / adversarial but why is it that (nearly) every article I see on Git has some sort of diagram within it? Yet "execution" is typically limited to CLI? That just feels suboptimal, if not just foolish.
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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by geezerjay on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @03:58AM (#15958760)
> Yet "execution" is typically limited to CLI? That just feels suboptimal, if not just foolish.

It looks like you mindlessly associate a CLI with a poor -- or suboptimal -- user experience. In fact even your choice of weasel words conveys the idea that you want to mindlessly push an irrational belief in spite of not being able to provide arguments to support it. The truth of the matter is that git -- or any other VCS -- operated through commands that change the current state of the repo. The command line interface excels when the user wants to run commands. Any GUI developed for command line tool will end up doing nothing more than replicate what the CLI already does, and will do so poorly.

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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by chiefalchemist on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @07:06PM (#15975125)
Not really. I associate a picture with 1000 words. So if the detailed example/ explanation is an image why isn't the actual process(es) a reflection of that?

Put another way, Git is a process that can be rendered pictorially. Words (i.e., CLI) are a less intuitive abstraction.

Pardon me for stating the obvious :)

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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by chris_wot on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @12:07AM (#15957904)
The issue is with understanding staging and the working directory. The lightbulb moment for me was reading this article from Atlassian:

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/resetting-checking-o...

Understanding that git reset --soft moves HEAD but doesn't change the staged snapshot or working directory, whilst --mixed updates the staged snapshot to match the commit but doesn't touch the working directory was very useful. And knowing that reset --hard updates both staging and the working directory to the commit was where I suddenly "got it".

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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by chiefalchemist on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @07:08PM (#15975142)
Right. And notice all the diagrams. So why use words when pictures better reflect reality?
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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by nothrabannosir on Monday December 18, 2017 @07:55PM (#15956914)
> Git is fundamentally better than most of the alternatives

No way. Only if you define “good” as “good at the kind of project that git is good at,” where it will hold vacuously.

I suffer daily through the cyst that is git LFS, and it’s a joke. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. I hear that it’s not doing any better in large scale mono repo land. Google doesn’t use it, afaik. Microsoft does (but multi repo, last I heard), Facebook doesn’t (custom Mercurial, some tasty quotes at [0]). Not a glowing “fundamentally better”, exactly.

[0] https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...

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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by dasil003 on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @12:41AM (#15958049)
That's a fair criticism for sure, git makes tradeoffs that fall apart with large repos. You can, however, go a whole career without those things being a problem. Most code repositories are simply not that big.
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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by jbergens on Thursday December 21, 2017 @09:16AM (#15978847)
And you can go a whole career without needing the extra staging features that git has and some other systems like mercurial don't. The ui gets a lot easier without that and for many developers that is probably the best trade off.
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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by rhencke on Monday December 18, 2017 @09:22PM (#15957251)
1. Git LFS is not part of Git. It's an unofficial extension, despite the name. I've got my own qualms about Git, but that's like complaining about GitHub's forking model as a reason Git is bad.

2. Microsoft uses Git in single large-scale mono repo form, for - believe it or not - Windows. It clocks in at about 3.5 million files, and a full clone weighs in at 300GB:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...

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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by piyush_soni on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @12:05AM (#15957902)
Microsoft uses Git in single large-scale mono repo form

They had to change git itself to be able to do that. So no, the article itself shows it was not ready for that big a repository.

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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by nothrabannosir on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @04:30AM (#15958935)
Git LFS is not part of Git.

That’s my point: without LFS it’s even worse to work with large files. If LFS is the best option you have, forget it. That’s an entire area of projects (anything with assets) you can’t use Git for.

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Re:Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations by dilap on Monday December 18, 2017 @08:46PM (#15957114)
I believe MS has most of windows in a git mono-repo now, enabled by a custom git-supporting filesystem they've developed:

https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS

Pretty cool stuff. Doesn't seem to address the large-files case so much as the many-files case, though. I would love better git support for large files.

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