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A comment on Pijul: A intuitive VCS unlike Git that's based on sound theory of patches. Parent comment

Re:Pijul: A intuitive VCS unlike Git that's based on sound t... by klodolph on Friday September 25, 2020 @04:32PM (#24593810)
Yes, the visualizers are key. My experience is that every team needs approximately one Git guru who can run basic training sessions, dictate the workflow (branching/tagging/etc), and fix things when they go wrong. Otherwise you get stick with a bunch of people memorizing Git commands and creating some unusable history.

And while I say “Git”, it’s really the same situation for any VCS, in my experience. I think the underlying problem that a VCS solves is the truly complicated part here.

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Re:Pijul: A intuitive VCS unlike Git that's based on sound t... by bsder on Saturday September 26, 2020 @12:37AM (#24596455)
> And while I say “Git”, it’s really the same situation for any VCS, in my experience.

Sorry, but no. I have taught CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial to executives, artists and students. They have no problem with the mental model.

With git, people with a Master's in CS get screwed up.

Having "working", "staging" and "repository" concepts is the problem. Maybe "staging" makes Linus' life easier, but unfortunately git escaped to the common people and "staging" makes life miserable for the 99% of normal use cases.

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Re:Pijul: A intuitive VCS unlike Git that's based on sound t... by klodolph on Saturday September 26, 2020 @08:51AM (#24598433)
Given the number of times I've had to go in and rescue someone using e.g. SVN or Hg, I can't say I've had the same experience.

The major problem is that as soon as you have a team of people with the same repo checked out, you have as many branches as you have people. These branches may not have explicit representations in the underlying VCS, but they exist just the same.

And so then you're dealing with scary "merge conflicts" for work that people have, from their perspective, already done but can't commit and push out.

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Re:Pijul: A intuitive VCS unlike Git that's based on sound t... by ubercow13 on Saturday September 26, 2020 @06:55AM (#24597829)
Subversion is simple to understand because it is simple, and relatively incapable. If you only use git like you would use Subversion, it's simple too. Subversion is much less easy when you have to do something like merging a long-lived branch.
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Re:Pijul: A intuitive VCS unlike Git that's based on sound t... by jcranmer on Saturday September 26, 2020 @08:49AM (#24598414)
You conveniently omit the inclusion of mercurial in the list. Mercurial is as powerful as git is--in a few cases, arguably more so (phases make history rewriting safe!)--and yet there is pretty objectively far less confusion for newbies than git has.

There's ample evidence that git is unnecessarily complicated for the DVCS model it uses.

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