Also to learn that `git reflog` exists, and gives you pointers to all the old states of your repo, even mid-merge or mid-rebase. If you get stuck with a bad rebase, you’re only a `git reflog; git checkout HEAD@{3}` away from being back where you started.
Tutorials like this one and others mentioned throughout the thread do a good job of breaking down the viscera from there.
That's not git, that's the command line - the interface with no inline visualization, no discoverability and no affordances.
git is not its command line interface. I use the git CLI like I use curl: a powerful tool for occasional surgical or automated operations directly on underlying protocol. Most of the time I prefer something that better fits my workflow: for git, it's Git Extensions; for HTTP, it's Chrome.
1) uncommitted stuff in workdir. Potentially can be lost, so commit often.
2) blobs in repo representing snapshots at commit time. Can never be lost.
3) symbolic references to the blobs. Can always recover from reflog.
4) tools to sync the above two things between repositories. (fetch and push)
5) tools to merge, diff and otherwise manipulate the changes between snapshots and files.
I'm confident that git will never lose my data, so long as I commit it. This makes experimentation stress-free.
Technically, you can lose data by explicitly deleting your refs, expiring the reflog, and running gc, but if you go that far you might as well rm -r .git
0) you forgot to explain git's index. Mercurial doesn't have the index, it works how you described git.
2) data (blobs, revsets, whatever) in the repo actually can never be lost, there is no automatic gc
3) no need for some different tool/viewer to view commits that don't have refs
Technically there are several ways to remove data from the repo, but it never ever happens automatically behind your back.
I think I've asked this before, but what exactly are mercurial's branches?
In git, they are a "physical" feature of the repository as it represents a set of lineages, not an actual repository object.
As such, any reference to a commit uniquely identifies a branch, so the concept of a "named line of development" is simply implemented as a reference that gets updated as you make more commits. When you "delete" a branch in git, it goes nowhere. Only its name is removed.
What sort of structure does mercurial use to represent its branches? I know they are not just an emergent thing like in git.
Two articles that might help if you really want to dig into it:
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-me...
https://bryan-murdock.blogspot.com/2013/06/git-branches-are-...
The first article also states that unnamed branches are useful for small, temporary diversions, and notes that git has to name branches, but I think that's somewhat misrepresenting git since you can throw away names as soon as they are no longer useful. To me it seems kind of silly to have unnamed branches, given that names are free and much easier to remember than commit hashes.
I think Linus' design goal was something that runs as quickly/efficiently as possible on large repositories.
> it is just a complex black box you chant arcane rituals at and hope it doesn't decide to burn your world down
My feeling too!
Git actually doesn’t scale to really huge monorepos.
IMHO the only real advantages over SVN for most users are the better branch/merge functions.
Which is a largish piece of software.
Have you tried looking into any other contemporary DVC systems?
I get Git, more or less. Having tried to make sense of Bazaar or Mercurial on several occasions (to understand the internal data model), I eventually gave up.
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.htm...
To provide an alternate viewpoint, I have never had trouble with Git. I’m a bottom-up how-does-this-thing-work sort of person so when I first started using Git, I sought to understand how it worked. That part of Git is pretty easy to understand. Knowing that made its CLI a lot easier to grok. Of course, at the time I was having to use ClearCase at work and Subversion on the side so Git, IMO, was a vast improvement to either of those tools.
(dear everyone here and elsewhere recommending git incantations "but of course you have to know what you're doing": if you regularly have to take a backup of your working area before interacting with the vcs, because the interaction may do things you did not intend from which the simplest way back is to reset hard and start over, I humbly suggest that the vcs has failed in its primary purpose)
It's something subversion can't do last I checked, so whenever I need to do a complicated operation with SVN, I import the local state into a git repo first :P
So I guess 97% of users don't really get git.
I think this is really damning. Developers understand complex languages/compilers like C++, Python, Java, etc, all of which have a good deal more intrinsic complexity than a VCS. So if a VCS isn't understood, it is badly designed.
Your idea of a "user's mental model" might land you into trouble though, because all of us come from different backgrounds (subversion, SSafe, git, HG...) and they all maddeningly redefine terms in different ways (eg branch, forks, commits, checkout).
If I do do this, I will explicitly lay out the user's metal model in the documentation at the start. Then it will be the user's fault if they can't be bothered to read it.
> Then it will be the user's fault if they can't be bothered to read it.
can be applied to you about git technically. I think that's just me being a "little" pedantic though.
It sounds like the issue you actually have is that the documentation isn't easily readable in one or two sittings, and you don't have the time (or can't be bothered) to go through it and learn it. Which I totally understand, everyone has different things they need to spend time on, most of the time learning Git isn't one of them.
I have read large parts of the git docs. I don't like them. This is not just the text: the low contract colours and hard-to-read fonts are also factors.
> It sounds like the issue you actually have is that the documentation isn't easily readable in one or two sittings, and you don't have the time (or can't be bothered) to go through it and learn it.
So how long should it take to learn a VCS? And how long does git take to learn?
I guess I would be lost as well just using the command line.
So I think: there must be a better way.
I have often thought about implementing a VCS. The idea behind one doesn't seem particularly complex to me (certainly it's simpler than programming languages). If I did I would quite probably use WYAG as a starting point. My first step would be to define the user's mental model -- i.e. what concepts they need to understand such that they can predict what the system will do. Then I would build a web-based UI that presents the status of the system to the user in terms of that model.