So like most other developers, I go about my day totally not understanding git at all and when something weird happens, I talk to that co-worker know understands get (there's always at least one such psychopath on each dev team in existence) and ask him to fix it. He invariably talks about how easy and elegant git is and then finally gets around to giving me a couple commands with non-sensical names and options that fix the problem.
I don't care, and I'm okay not caring. Not learning git might even give me extra time to learn about these magical computer algorithms I've heard so much about.
I'm that psycopath :D
> I don't care, and I'm okay not caring. Not learning git might even give me extra time to learn about these magical computer algorithms I've heard so much about.
I'm fine with this actually. If you don't care, and don't want to. That's actually totally fine. I personally will look at you a bit strange. But when it comes down to it. You should only care about what you want to. But please, for my continued (admittedly borderline) sanity. Don't try to convince others that it's too hard to learn, and/or that they shouldn't try. I want to work with people who are curious, people who want to learn how cool things work. But there's a trend in software engineering, that parts of it are too hard, and that it's a waste of time to learn them. That's a scary thought to me; imagine the next generation of software devs, all convinced that they can't understand something, or that it would be a waste of their time to try?
Git is worth learning but it's about 10x harder to learn than it would have been had its designer known anything about human interface principles. And its manual is useless because that same designer wrote the manual too.
Git would be completely unlearnable without Google and Stack Overflow, but since those things exist, it's worth learning.
But you're right, we should all understand this stuff. And if it wasn't for that one magic coworker (you're really taking one for the team), I probably would.
Learning the implementation details and reading the mystifying documentation to learn what something is called can be a bit wasteful but understanding the git model is very worthwhile. It is interesting to see how it handles the pragmatic issues of fixing the situation up when the history becomes snarled.
Learning git will make some not insignificant number of people better at concurrent programming. Most build systems don't do that..
I beg to differ. Mercurial is all about immutable history. Git is explicitly designed to mutate history (that's what rebase does) in the demented (IMHO) pursuit of a linear change log.
Git commits are never mutated. They are referred to by a hash of their content after all.
What's the UI for getting at those old commits? Is it possible to get a true chronological log from them? Do they stay around forever or do they get garbage collected eventually?
git log --all --graph --oneline --reflog
git config --global alias.lg "log --date=format-local:'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' --pretty=format:'%cd %<(20,trunc)%an %C(auto)%h%Creset%C(auto)%d%Creset %s'"
git lg --all --graph --reflog
The output of git log with --graph is not chronological, because it does a topological traversal of the commit graph.
> Do they stay around forever or do they get garbage collected eventually?
They get garbage collected eventually. As a rule you should not assume dangling commits are safe. If you need to keep one, assign a trivial branch name to it.
The same as any other commit. You can check them out by referring to their hash, by referring to any tags that point to them, or any branch that points at them.
The other reply gives options assuming the commits have been orphaned (no tags or branches point at them).
(Obviously the branch/pointer itself is mutable.)
Thats my personal story. The other problem I see is a large number of engineers who say git is not hard, it's very straightforward and they understand it very well, but actually they don't. And every once in a while they royally F up the entire repo and cause issues in deployment because of that. So git's main problem from my perspective is that it's an extremely advanced, unforgiving tool that gives a false sense of expertise to many mediocre programmers.
You've just described nearly every tool, show enough carelessness with a hammer and you'll certainly fuck something up.
> So I make it a point to never use any command other than cherry-pick. Everything else I use GitHub desktop for. Its a simple ui that only lets you do the bare minimum of git actions thats less F up prone.
Yes, when you handicap yourself, limiting to a subset of available features. You'll usually have fewer ways to screw up. But I hope that's not advice you give out to others. That's exactly the mentality I'm trying to encourage people to avoid. "I don't understand it, so instead of trying to learn more about it, I'll just limit my self to a trivial subset of the actual options." That's not how you get good at anything.
> Thats my personal story. The other problem I see is a large number of engineers who say git is not hard, it's very straightforward and they understand it very well, but actually they don't. And every once in a while they royally F up the entire repo and cause issues in deployment because of that.
Other people making a mistake is pretty common. Sorry you've had to deal with it, I've been there myself. Fixing others mistakes is pretty annoying. It's expecially annoying when they pretend like they already know everything they need to about git; refusing to learn anything new.
> So git's main problem from my perspective is that it's an extremely advanced, unforgiving tool that gives a false sense of expertise to many mediocre programmers.
Again, it's not extremely advanced. MS Word has more features/options than git does. And I'd never call git unforgiving. In-fact git has been my best friend; I deleted a live directory with a bunch of code that I (foolishly) didn't have backed up anywhere. Including a good portion of the .git directory. Thankfully, git was very forgiving to me, and I was able to restore most of it from the objects that git keeps. But that's something I didn't know how to do before deleting my repo. It's something I had to go out and learn.
True, but some tools are easier to be carless with. A hammer isn't one of them, which is why you don't find it in every kitchen. Git (and now that I think about it, every advanced command line tool) is very un-intuitive for many people. I've been using computers for several hours every day since 1997, so take me as whatever type of use you want, but I don't fully understand how rebase works yet. Or the hard flag. I'm sure if I sit down for an afternoon I'll understand but without that I won't. Which is what I'll define as "un-intuitive".
I chose to handicap myself here because the benefit till now has been very marginal. If I have a full afternoon to study I'd rather spend it on ML lectures or understanding something else, instead of source control.
However, this equation is changing, because my team is thinking of starting a mono-repo style coding architecture. This probably can't be done without full understanding of gits features, so I probably will spend the time needed to understand it's features, how it works, and some of the newer features that can be helpful in the pursuit. You don't have to be an expert in every tool you use every day, and a good tool is one which lets even a non expert not F it up, is all.
Git maintains a tree of commits, each commit pointing to its parent. When you rebase, by default git finds the last-common-ancestor commit of the branch you're rebasing and the branch you're rebasing onto. That common ancestor is the base, and the subsequent commits on the branch you're rebasing are replayed on the latest commit of the branch you're rebasing onto.
> Or the hard flag
You mean reset --hard?
Good programs aren't that easy to fuck up. Easy when messing with the file system, or deliberately destroying data, but not during normal use. Git is very easy to fuck up even during normal use (multiple people working on a software).
> when you handicap yourself, limiting to a subset of available features.
Yes. I practice very similar approach as GP, but I use couple other commands too, checkout, reset, clear, bisect.
Just because some people wanted a feature, doesn't mean I agree with their estimation of risk/reward. The risk being destroying couple days of other people's work. We were really close one time, didn't happen because my local copy was not yet synced.
I disagree that git design is responsible for this. If you have enough people doing something, especially when they all have different subsets of knowledge about the tool they're using. The chance someone will do something incompatible with everyone else rises. Git is clearly more complex than a saw, but give one to enough people who don't understand how to fell a tree, and ask them to build you a deck, oh and you're not allowed to talk to eachother. Something's gonna go badly.
> Just because some people wanted a feature, doesn't mean I agree with their estimation of risk/reward. The risk being destroying couple days of other people's work. We were really close one time, didn't happen because my local copy was not yet synced.
There's a story here, that I'm interested to hear. But git was kinda designed to avoid this exact thing. There's a reason that your local copy is 100% complete by default. Which means if you really came close to losing a lot of work. All of you were going out of your way to use git in a very not normal way.
Design of the VCS is almost fine. "Almost" because I would prefer to track renames, but I can live without that.
The CLI is horrible.
> I'm interested to hear
Someone used wrong command-line switch, and the merge commit was made in wrong way, destroying changes made in other branch. Then feature branch was deleted I think.
I don't know or care who did that or what was the command-line switch, the point is, the thing is too fragile. People aren't perfect, they make mistakes. Good interfaces are designed in a specific way, to reduce the probability and consequences of these mistakes. In some areas like flight control I think there're even laws about that.
Come to think about it, git does warn you when you tried to delete a branch that's not merged into any other branch.
That switch might have done something about rewriting history. Or maybe it was rebase, I never do either of these things. Multiple people (except me) have synchronized after that happened. If interested how we fixed — I’ve copy-pasted couple commands from a chat, sent by a co-worker who knows more about git. These commands pushed my local branch under a new name, then people managed to sort it out with a merge.
There's also the reflog. The github interface probably has a friendly representation of it.
You are right it's not hard, it's complex. My problem is that my actual problems can be both hard and complex... and putting a complex distraction in the way detracts from my goals: not enhances it.
I think many in technology fail to appreciate this distinction. I often hear open source advocates respond to complaints about software quality jumping up to suggest opening issues or contributing fixes... which is fine in its own right: but if those issues/fixes aren't reasonably in line with my own goals in trying to use some class of tool... and some other solutions such as a closed source solution meet the goals more readily... I'm probably not going to spend my time advancing someone else's goals at the expense of my own.
If that's the case, why wouldn't you concede that it is?
"The problem has always come down to the missing attempt to understand the issue"
Isn't that always the case with misunderstanding something?
That 'it's common' and 'people misunderstand the issue' is essentially proof that at least from a certain level, 'git is hard'.
- Git is very powerful. Nobody doubts this. - Git is sometimes easier to understand when the model is well understood - yes, this is a common refrain.
But - it's still a very complex model, and the UI is bizarre + counter intuitive and as a command line, without a lot of visual reference.
Even standards and practices are not well established as there continue to be wars over idiomatic usage, arguments on HN often by 'experts' who actually make some mistakes in their argumentation.
I suspect a lot of people who think they are 'good at git' 1) don't realize how much they don't know and 2) maybe lacking in self-awareness as to how much trouble if often causes.
I've seen very smart people with very strong git skills befuddled far too often for me to believe the tool does not have problems.
The fact that 'Oh Shit Git' even exists, is in some ways problematic - because it's obviously not clear to many how to truly 'undo' things they've done. OSG could be 100x longer, easily.
Have a look here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4114095/how-do-i-revert-...
This is really scary. It's not a complicated question necessarily, maybe a little specific - but - there are just so many answers, so many variables, incredible complexity in the answers.
Git has a kind of 'unbounded complexity' that allows for so, so many situations and uses cases. There really wasn't much 'Product thinking' rather, just a decade long cadence of 'let's add this feature with this flag' over and over again.
It's such an interesting case study from a Product perspective.
It may only seem that way because there are parts of the model you don't understand. There is a finite (relatively small) number of concepts necessary to mastering git.
This is only partly true. The degree of variation and options in the command line actually fiddles with that 'simplicity' quite fundamentally.
Even if one has a 'clear understanding of the concepts' - the commands don't necessarily map clearly to that model. And there are so many commands, so many little variations.
I've tried a few tutorials about git internals before, but always get confused in the middle for some reason. I go just after git being a list with pointers where each element having a hash and what not. But still something seems to be missing in the end to make it all coherent.
> Isn't that always the case with misunderstanding something?
No, some things are difficult. Git might be one of them, but I have no reason to believe that. It's the attempt that's missing. They most often, don't understand git, not because they tried to, and failed. But because they've never really tried to understand the problem. Skipping the part where they find the root cause, actually figured out exactly what's happening, and what's gone awry. They've only searched Stackover flow for the `git reset --hard` command they need.
> But - it's still a very complex model, and the UI is bizarre + counter intuitive and as a command line, without a lot of visual reference.
As someone who's used a lot of command line tools, I reject this out right. Git is a very simple command line tool. The difficulty is more akin to learning how to use a CLI, not necessarily git itself. Try teaching MS Word to someone while also trying to teach them to write an essay. The missing visual reference will throw people off, but that doesn't make learning how to use it harder. Instead of clicking around for the button that might do something. They have to read something, git --help is super useful. Just like F1 or clicking the help dropdown at the top.
> Even standards and practices are not well established as there continue to be wars over idiomatic usage, arguments on HN often by 'experts' who actually make some mistakes in their argumentation. I suspect a lot of people who think they are 'good at git' 1) don't realize how much they don't know and 2) maybe lacking in self-awareness as to how much trouble if often causes. I've seen very smart people with very strong git skills befuddled far too often for me to believe the tool does not have problems.
I haven't had these experiences, so I really can't comment. I have to say, I don't really believe people when they say they know and understand git. If someone says they know how to use a chainsaw, do they also know you have to oil it? Knowing how to use something isn't the same as understanding it. Which is what I want people to do....
> Have a look here:
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4114095/how-do-i-revert-....
> This is really scary. It's not a complicated question necessarily, maybe a little specific - but - there are just so many answers, so many variables, incredible complexity in the answers.
I'm not scared by this at all, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
> Git has a kind of 'unbounded complexity' that allows for so, so many situations and uses cases. There really wasn't much 'Product thinking' rather, just a decade long cadence of 'let's add this feature with this flag' over and over again.
Because git is feature rich doesn't mean much. Name a software engineering tool you think is simple/easy, and (if you try to be reasonable,) I'd be willing to bet it has nearly the same, if not more features than git does.
That's great, but most people would disagree, using the argument that there are rather a large number of variations of commands.
Can you think of another 'command line tool' with more complexity?
Git questions are amply popular on Stack Exchange. It's not that hard to use most other commands. All you need is -help.
"I'm not scared by this at all, so I have no idea what you're talking about."
It's 'scary' because it's ostensibly a very basic question, with apparently quite a number of varied solutions, each of them fairly complicated, and apparently not without controversy.
The second to top answer starts with: "Lots of complicated and dangerous answers here, but it's actually easy:"
If you put on your 'Product/Manager/Investor/I want to make a thing, not tinker in intellectualisms' hat for a moment, it is 'very scary'.
How can answers to simple questions about a tool be 'dangerous'? Of course, it's because some of these operations will screw up a repo, or create undue confusion. That's not good.
Why are there so many variations in answers?
Why is someone making a diagram? If someone has to 'get out the whiteboard' to answer simple tooling questions, then there are added levels of abstraction - which could be fine - but why on earth is that necessary?
Why are people having to go down rabbit holes of 'possible dangerous operations' to do something simple?
There are literally 62 addendums and comments to the top answer!
This is the 'opposite' of a 'good product' and the opposite of 'easy' - it has red flags all over it to the point wherein I'm thinking that I wish there were administrative options to make sure bad outcomes cannot happen, to start.
Complexity is costly, expensive, risky. Git is already a 'secondary factor' in making a product, the software being the 'primary factor'. So we're having to invest in knowledge, risk, problems etc. with 'a tool to help the tool' ... and when we run into serious problems, who do we call?
I don't want my devs to be tripping over themselves, falling into holes, possibly unrecoverable situations, spending time solving problems they should not have to.
Does the problem we are trying to solve imply this kind of necessary complexity? I don't think so.
"Name a software engineering tool you think is simple/easy"
So the question really is - what kind of complexity (magnitude, necessary complexity vs. arbitrary, required abstractions etc.) does a tool provide vs. the value provided - that is the question.
Git provides quite a lot of power, but its constrained by its own complexity - for very standard operations, it's quite easy. But beyond that it's a mine field.
There are literally people on this thread indicating that they don't even allow themselves to use commands they don't know well. There are ample stories of people getting them into problems they can't get out of, loss of code etc.. Where else does this happen for tooling?
There is a 'Golden Rule of Git' of something never to do - this to me is a huge Red Flag. Why the hell is something that 'should never be done' - even doable?!? This to me is a perfect example of the 'unbounded' nature of the complexity.
Finally - I have actually never met a Git expert. All the smart people I know who are 'strong in Git' are often befuddled in various situations. Yes, that happens in software, but it doesn't need to happen with our code management systems.
> Why is someone making a diagram? If someone has to 'get out the whiteboard' to answer simple tooling questions, then there are added levels of abstraction - which could be fine - but why on earth is that necessary?
It's an inherent aspect of distributed version control that the history of your repository forms a graph, and therefore drawing diagrams can be helpful.
Please take the following as the friendly advice it's meant to be: the fact that you even ask this question will suggest to every advanced user of DVCS that you really don't understand what you're talking about. Which is fine, if you have the humility to accept it and improve.
Please take the following friendly advice: if you don't know the difference between a 'command line tool' and a 'programming language' - then maybe you don't know what you're talking about. It's ok, if you have some humility, you can improve and overcome.
FYI I'm well aware that systems such as CVS have 'abstractions' that diagrams could possibly help. That said 'diagrams' are relate the the 'inherent abstractions' in many things, and yet they are used very seldom in Stack Exchange.
The fact is - git is quite obviously very complicated, more complicated than it needs to be, and poses risks that most other tools do not.
The bizarre myopia of those not willing to concede that, and the inherent risks is problematic.
It speaks to a specific kind of intellectual arrogance within CompSci and it's a huge blind spot for the profession.
Every git question - even the most mundane - is a rabbit hole:
"What's the difference between Git Pull and Git Fetch?" [2]
That should be easy enough - but no - there is a 35 comments (only one of the many answers) to argue about the specific nature of what is happening, and no full agreement on some material things.
This is all exemplary of a 'bad product'. A 'good product' would provide a definition, and a few comments on possible corner cases - and that's it.
Git is what happens when you take a 'very powerful, but complicated concept' - and then don't manage it as a product, rather, just lazily throw complex command lines on the fire and let it stir. We are wasting a lot of time on Git.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=awk&rlz=1C5CHFA_enCA869CA869...
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/292357/what-is-the-diffe...
[2]
If all you want from a VCS is a snapshot of each part of history, git can do that (and will actually do it better than a more traditional option like SVN because it doesn't hide merges by doing them on your working directory before you commit), but ultimately there's a lot of value in doing more and if you want to exploit that you should understand how the VCS represents your code and how to use it, not paste together advice from other people on the internet who may not fully understand it themselves. I agree the git UI has problems, mostly relating to naming things and the fact that many commands have convenience options which mean they invoke actions which are different from their base operation (like git checkout -b <name>, which is basically a way of doing git branch <name> followed by git checkout <name>. It would make more sense if this was just the way git branch operated by default, or at least as a flag on git branch instead of git checkout). The underlying model git presents is really not hard to learn (and it helps a hell of a lot when googling how to do something because you can be precise about it) but it's where people tangle themselves most in knots because they think it's either too difficult or not worth understanding, and it's wrong on both counts because it will cost them hugely in time and stress.
Yes - I get that - but this is my point.
It's such a complicated tool (or rather, specifics are not obvious) that people don't even know how to ask questions.
This is part of my point.
Ambiguous questions, ambiguous answers, a real propensity for people to be giving really bad answers.
This is endemic with Git, more so than I've seen with anything else.
I sometimes wonder if Git should should actually be used with some kind of visual representation as a default standard - and that our propensity for 'command line interface' as the de-facto means of real interface with computers may not be appropriate to communicating 'what is going on'.
Much like people fuss desperately over road signs, human factors in automobiles ... perhaps we should be thinking in these terms much more with this tool.
That said, the syntax is a little arcane, and it could benefit from a smoother user interface. (like most package managers)
As one example, I think the common commands could be separated out from the sort of back-end commands that only experienced users should use.
Maybe cowboys contributed too, but despite horrible interface I think VCS part was actually better. Before everyone switched to git, I’ve used cvs, svn, sourcesafe, clearcase. They all required 2 things to work well:
1. You must be in a room with a low-latency 1GBPs link to the server.
2. Dedicated sys.admins on site whose job is supporting the infrastructure, VCS included.
When people don’t screw up with the interface too much, git can be better: doesn’t care about network latency by design, handles conflicts better, branching/merging is very easy…
"Reverting a file" is a higher level concept you can build on top of that, but that's not the fault of git checkout. Also arguably to truly revert a file you'd have to follow it up with a git commit.
I would also point out that recent versions of git have added a git switch subcommand because of some of these complaints.
The underlying rule is never to make destructive changes on a working directory that also has changes I intend to keep. This massively reduces the risk of data loss by accidental fat fingering of a command.
Git isn't hard, it might be complex, but how it works and how to use it is simple as far as applications and/or processes go.
I find myself constantly trying to dispel the idea that git is too difficult to understand in depth. The problem has always come down to the missing attempt to understand the issue, over trying to ^c, ^v a solution.
Seriously, if you think git is hard: don't ask for it to be easier, ask instead to be stronger. (Or in this case smarter, something you surprisingly have control over)