Yes, a big factor of it is "populist shackling", too. But being popular doesn't just mean that a lot of other people use it, it also means that a lot of other people use it to share code with you. Which is an important step beyond the popularity fallacy.

It's merging workflow is awful - I'm fine with correcting the odd whitespace-as-conflict, but I find the fact that git presents me with >>>>> eyebiting ====== conflict markers <<<<<< even when I'm using a merge tool difficult to excuse.

Most of all, more than once, git has completely eaten work, which hasn't happened to me with a VCS since the days of CVS and corrupted repos.

Frankly, I see two kinds of arguments in support of git: arguments that derive from the fact that it's a DVCS, and therefore apply to other (IMO better) tools, or "community acceptance" (a la github, Rails) which I find frustrating and circular. Oh, and it's somewhat faster for infrequent operations.

Re "eating work", most of the commands that could potentially "eat work" are explicit about blowing things away, and is more a problem of not knowing what your tool is going to do. And Git will never "eat" anything that's actually been committed or stashed without you explicitly telling Git to drop that data.

`git help <command>` should be used liberally if you're not certain of what it's going to do. The documentation is extremely thorough.

Really? I think that is one of its strongest points. being able to switch branches by just going 'git checkout <branch>' and immediately having the entire file structure switched out to what's 'contained' in the new branch was a big win for me.

Git also alerts you when you've made changes and are switching branches, so you can commit or stash your changes to the branch you were on and not mix it up with the new branch, unless thats what you really want to do.

> It's very easy to find yourself on no branch at all

Interesting. In what situation would that happen? I always thought you had to be on some sort of branch (master) at least to use git.

> It's merging workflow is awful - I'm fine with correcting the odd whitespace-as-conflict, but I find the fact that git presents me with >>>>> eyebiting ====== conflict markers <<<<<< even when I'm using a merge tool difficult to excuse.

Sounds like we're complaing about a cosmetic issue.

> Frankly, I see two kinds of arguments in support of git:

How about the fact that its branching model is pretty awesome and it gives you the tools to do exactly what you want with your version control (rebase, amending commit histories etc)?

Cheap branching is a fantastic feature - that all the open DVCS tools have.

Git focuses on the ability of developers to edit their revision history and provide lovely linear histories (hence the existence of stash, rebase, et al). Git as a tool and as a community encourages one to do so - but the result can be that your local repo and my local repo can no longer be synchronized. Furthermore, it's easy to create a commit of inconsistent code - since you can commit file changes in separate commits.

Ultimately git simplifies the work of project maintainers at the expense of day-to-day development, which isn't surprising given it's source, but I think it's a bad trade.

Nope. All rebase operations create a brand new branch and merely repoint a ref at it. The original pre-rebase branch is still untouched, and "git reset HEAD@{0}" (see: git-reflog) will reverse the effects of any rebase (and of course, you can undo the undo). Rebase does not affect synchronization in any way except that two users may have very different commit histories that they both call "master". Git handles the synchronization fine, however, so this is a social issue rather than a technical issue. I regularly work on large projects with many committers that rebase, and I have never had any difficulty. Hell, git pull even defaults to "git pull --rebase" now, so you probably won't even see any merge commits when you pull from someone's rebased branch now.

Ultimately git simplifies the work of project maintainers at the expense of day-to-day development

I disagree again. Git makes both day-to-day work easy, and it makes maintaining the project easy. When you are in hacking mode, you just commit with a short message whenever you feel like it. Commit freely, branch freely, merge freely, undo freely. When you are done and you want to cleanup your work to share, you can quickly split commits, combine commits, reorder commits, add better commit messages, and so on. Then, you can push to a public repository, ask someone to pull your branch, or just email patches around. If you mess it up somewhere, everything is undoable. Git even has tools to make merge conflicts easy to handle; if it sees a conflict you've manually repaired before, it can automatically try that repair without bothering you again.

Anyway, it's clear that some people take issue with people "rewriting history" and that they will never use git. But I take issue with having to maintain projects that have an incomprehensible (but "historically accurate" in the sense that I know exactly what the state was when some random person on the Internet typed "commit") history, and so I use git. It is the most efficient use of my time and mental energy, and is why its become so popular.

Actually, that's a feature. You can make finer grained commits this way. Use rebasing (or amending a commit, when you are just putting in the second commit) to make your changes atomic, when they need to be atomic.

Your repository isn't always in a consistent state. There's value in keeping inconsistent in between states---and git allows you to do that, but also allows you to clean up, after you're finished.

(Of course this creates an alternate history.)

If you check out a revision, and not a branch, you will be on "no branch at all". But you asked for it, then.

It's a powerful tool, and the docs are fine if you are an expert who already knows what you're looking for. I'll submit that it can be incredibly hard for a noob to learn to use correctly.

Can you provide any specifics about this? My understanding (and experience) is that git makes it rather difficult to actually lose work. It may be easy to misplace, but never lose.

I don't think you understand how git works. Calling it "poorly thought through" when you haven't taken the time to understand it is not a compelling argument.

"It's very easy to find yourself on no branch at all"

A branch is simply a pointer to a specific commit. If you checkout a random commit it is likely not a branch. I don't know why you find this troubling.

"It's very easy ... for a developer to believe they've committed work to a shared branch when in fact it's a private one"

Again, this is from a lack of understanding. All commits are to your local repository. It seems you haven't tried very hard to understand how git works.

Neither is saying the OP hasn't taken the time to understand it.

Are you suggesting that I'm wrong about his level of understanding or that one can make a valid critique of something they don't understand?

Also, the book is available for free online http://progit.org/book/

You might want to customize merge.conflictstyle

I do like the default of git however, and prefer it to, say, Mercurial.

I've never ever found myself on "no branch", and in cases where I've commited a bunch of code to a non-shared branch, I can easily push my branch to origin and make it shared.

Frankly, I see two kinds of arguments in support of git: arguments that derive from the fact that it's a DVCS, and therefore apply to other (IMO better) tools, or "community acceptance" (a la github, Rails) which I find frustrating and circular.

I use Git for exactly those reasons. Why wouldn't I use the DVCS the rest of the community uses? Why would I use, for example, Mercurial or Fossil over git? I think you missed the third argument in support of Git: "I like it and it works well for what I do."

I can't comment on whether or not svn/hg/bzr/git/darcs have well-chosen defaults. I only know that I hear it's a common complaint about git.

The only non-git DVCS I'd even consider or recommend is darcs--its model is different enough to make it much better for certain workflows than git. It is also incredibly easy to understand and dead simple to use.

I've tried using darcs a few years ago (it was my first DVCS system, actually). Did they fix the exponential runtimes one got occasionally? If yes, I'd probably give it another go.

1. Pull revisions 2. Discover local workspace was corrupted. 3. Delete local workspace and restart.

I'm not a fan of Darcs either. :)

The one thing that still gives me the heebies is the CRLF handling, but I think that's because rails generates unix-style files, and I get a warning from git gui whenever I use those scripts.

Not to mention tortoise git http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/