Other than that, I recommend that people learn to use git properly. In my work, I often have problems with people overwriting their commits and trying to handle merge requests of commits where one commit message is "did some updates" and the other commit is "some fixes". Getting to know git for an hour, may have prevented both issues. But I am biased, since I use git since my bachelor thesis.

Sorry to be harsh here, but that is completely useless advice. It's a tautology. Of course people should learn to use git "properly". What's the alternative, that they should learn to use it improperly? Everyone should learn to use everything properly. It's like telling someone dealing with a crisis that they should "take appropriate action", as if taking inappropriate action was something that someone would actually seriously consider absent this advice.

The problem is that no one knows what "properly" means when it comes to git. Git itself provides no clue, and everyone and their second cousin has an opinion. That makes the advice to use git "properly" utterly vacuous. Figuring out what "properly" means is the whole problem with git.

[UPDATE] See also my earlier comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580478

It continues to be kind of frustrating to me. It feels like a tool that should be wrapped in something else and never even brought up to 99% of users. A half finished idea on productivity and team centric version control (to get ahead of comments: I know it's not designed to be that, but that's how it's very frequently used).

There are lots of UIs for git - many people on this forum will advocate for using one. My personal experience is that a UI manages to over-simplify the git workflow. It never quite allows you to perform all of the useful tasks you want, unless your use of git is very basic.

In a more general sense, git can also be considered quite conceptually simple; "getting it" is not the real problem most users have. The confusion about what commands do comes from the fact that users learn the tool backwards. No job bothers to teach a junior developer about the DAG and what commits, branches, and refs really are. Instead, they are forced to start with git's large and crufty CLI - so it's no surprise that it's hard to pick up any intuition about what's going on.

And that's a problem with lots of technical teaching, not just git. Since the focus is on getting immediate observable results, and not on conceptual understanding, users tend to learn how to use tools instead of how they work. That creates a culture of "I don't know what this is doing, and I'm too scared to mess with it" - basically the anti-hacker mentality.

yeah I guess I don't really align with the "Developers must learn the internals of all of the technology they are required to touch", and I don't really agree with the sentiment that that decision disqualifies one from "hacker mentality".

The DAG, commits, refs, etc. are not the "internals" of git - they are the basic building blocks of its mental model. Without them, there is no way to understand what git is doing - so it's no surprise many people think git is unintuitive, because they aren't taught what those concepts are.

The thing I'm saying is counter to the hacker mentality is using a tool as a black box, without understanding what it does and what it is trying to do. You don't have to read the code and know all the technical details.

Lots of users treat git as a small set of known commands that they execute in sequence until the repo is in the state they want; and any deviation from that happy path is met with a repo wipe and re-clone. A hacker should be happy to play around with various man pages and commands to build an understanding of what each command really does - and then be able to fearlessly mix and match commands, because they know how they are affecting the repo at each step.

And I'm saying that this statement is just hustle culture nonsense.

> A hacker should be happy to play around with various man pages and commands to build an understanding of what each command really does - and then be able to fearlessly mix and match commands, because they know how they are affecting the repo at each step.

No true scotsman would use git without reading books about it!

This is just nonsense. Gatekeeping holier than thou nonsense.

I feel no embarrassment about it either. You may pride yourself in using Vim, while working on a multi-thousand-file project. You are a power user, good for you. Now go collect other time-wasting useless accolades, like Pokemons.

Don't cookbook it, understand what the thing you're typing means. Don't use a GUI to abstract it away, be familiar with the CLI and what it's doing. Don't default to rm-rf when you get stuck, check git reflog and see if you can unfuck yourself first. Ask someone who doesn't have your problems how they're using it - it's possible you're "holding it wrong" in some obvious way, but in a way that masks the true problem that's biting you.

Some of my coworkers regularly have problems with git - I don't, and some other coworkers also don't. We all use roughly the same workflow, it's the people familiar with "what does pull --rebase really do?" that don't get into trouble and/or can get themselves back out of trouble, and the ones who always type the same command regardless of the situation that have problems.

Learn your tools, inside and out.

> it's the people familiar with "what does pull --rebase really do?" that don't get into trouble and/or can get themselves back out of trouble

Absolutely not my experience. No small amount of people who seem to be doing more with GIT than me regularly get into trouble. Has been the case in at least 7 companies so far. Check your selection bias.

> and the ones who always type the same command regardless of the situation that have problems.

People like you forget that we use tools to make our lives easier. Tools. Not a whole damned ecosystem of dyslexic scripts that can't make up their mind even on a common CLI switch convention...

> Learn your tools, inside and out.

I am not paid to know GIT inside out. I am paid to deliver and fix code and to not step on other people's feet. I am aware that the second part is what many deem to be an ideal case for knowing GIT inside out but not to me and not to almost all devs I ever worked with. I do indeed want to issue one command and be done with it.

GIT does a poor job of bringing remote changes into your branch, for example. As other commenters have pointed out, it can do much better, like detect concurrent identical changes -- which is something that happens often in big teams, people just swing by a module and fix a trivial bug and include it in a bigger PR. You can argue until the end of days that's not a good dev team practice but in the end these things still do happen and this supposedly amazing tool is supposed to handle it. Guess it isn't designed for that?

> It's possible you're "holding it wrong" in some obvious way

"Obvious", sure. As if I care what an index, staging area, reflog etc. are. I don't. But GIT's team has been stubborn. This article seem to show some desire to improve UX, which might go contrary to what you feel what GIT users should do. ;) So I'd say even their team is starting to recognize some problems and are working to address them.

GIT's problem is super classical in all dev tooling. The creator(s) directly exposed the underlying data structures and are putting the onus on the user to learn them inside and out. As opposed to actually making a good UX.

Stuff like, say, "git sync" (which should do "fetch" + try to merge/rebase main branch with yours) should have been no-brainer right from the start.

Your argument is still the same as the other git detractors, and is still wrong.

It _is_ part of your job, it _is_ part of delivering and fixing code. It's the same as anything else you're using. It may be a larger surface area that you're exposed to, but it's no different from CI/CD, build systems or something like a package manager. You don't need to understand how pip or npm or maven works to deliver software effectively, but if you get into trouble you have no alternative to rm-rf.

> As if I care what an index, staging area, reflog etc. are. I don't.

If you don't want to learn it then stop complaining about how difficult it is to use. That's your problem, not git's.

All of those things are important to the power of git. If you don't want / refuse to learn about them then you're trying to build your software with a car stuck in first gear and complaining about how slow it is. STFU and RTFM.

None of this detracts from your final point, which is valid! Just because the UX is mediocre (at best) doesn't mean you can't learn it.

Imagine your deployment pipeline required you to manually craft TCP packages to send to your machines to deploy code...would you still say "it _is_ part of your job, it _is_ part of delivering and fixing code", or would you say "that is stupid"?

With GIT, you are spending more time on learning and battling the tooling required to deliver code, than actually writing and testing the code.

You're doing it really really wrong if you spend more time learning git than writing your code. Even with its bad UX it's just not that hard.

I think you've missed OPs point by focusing too much on a single word ('properly'). Yes, there's no clear-cut way on how to use git, no silver bullet, but the main problem with git is that most devs simply panic when they have to do anything that goes beyond the bog-standard commit/pull/push/merge. Rebase? Squash? Reset? Rebase interactively? I think OP was referring to this cluelessness with 'not using properly', rather than which approach to git is the best.

I work on a monorepo with 40-something other devs, and we've recently switched to enforced linear history because the history got to the point of being completely useless, it was an unreadable spiderweb. The problem was not that folks didn't see that what they were doing was not-so-good (introducing often more merge-commits with every PR than non-merges), it was that they had no clue how to avoid that.

It took us quite a bit of time to get everyone up to speed but pretty much everyone got around to it after a while. It's not rocket science after all.

Should I be doing something different? As I said, rebase in that situation is disastrous. Many folks recommend it vigorously but are not around when things inevitably go wrong.

I think you're referring to what I call "conflict cascades"? E.g., you're 4 commits ahead of "master", and want to rebase on top of it - but you have a conflict with your first commit, and after you resolve it, this results in conflicts in the second one, etc.?

It's a very interesting question because it's one of the main pain points of rebase that simply does not exist with merge.

What I've found for myself is that it's very important to create "atomic commits", which do not rely on other commits to make sense or "be complete". For example, a very common thing that I see is "fix formatting", "fix tests" commits, because some build was complaining about something being broken. And it's often these kind of commits that create weird conflicts (especially the formatting ones) because just a lot of code is moved/refactored/added/removed etc.

But do these commits make sense on their own? For example, if you have a history as follows:

    <commit-1> Introduce new fancy feature
    <commit-2> Fix formatting
    <commit-3> Fix tests

This was of course just an example, but in my experience, if people follow these kinds of trains of thoughts - what can be in a separate commit, what should be together, etc., there is an inherently smaller conflict-cascade-potential, which pays off a lot when rebasing. On top of that, it also makes history generally more readable and individual commits more meaningful and easier to cherry-pick.

What is wrong with a master branch whose history reads "Merged feature foo" after "Merged feature bar"? If you need more detail then check out the feature branch and git bisect to your heart's content.

I do wish that we could "archive" branches from the output of `git branch -a` but really it's not a big deal when branch names are prefixed by Jira ticket identifiers.

I think it's also a bit a question of team size. If your project has just a handful of devs working on it, merge-commits really don't matter all that much. If there are a few dozen with a good amount of juniors on the repo (a bit over 40 devs in my case), the commit-history becomes an absolutely unreadable spiderweb, that's at least my experience.

At work, we want to move towards trunk-based development (merge to master goes straight to prod), but whenever master was broken, a look at the commit-history didn't really all tell you that much about the who, how and why without checking it out and digging into it. So we've recently started to enforce linear history, in which case it is immediately obvious without the shred of a doubt who's responsible. Analyzing the build became an absolute breeze, at the cost of having a bit of a harder time at "insertion"-point (which is perfectly fine, given the fact that after merge, it should eventually go straight to prod).

It took a while to get everyone on board, but it was really worth the efforts and can only recommend it (I most definitely will prefer a workplace that is open to such practices in the future). In general, most devs were also quite happy to be guided through the process, as it is clear that git is probably one of the longer-lasting constants in our industry.

Also, I can't repeat it enough; speaking from experience, most devs severely overestimate the complexity of cherry-pick/rebase/reset/reflog etc. Whenever I had sessions explaining it or helping someone out with a problem, they had their first "aha!"-moments after a few minutes, and after that with some do-it-yourself-experience most of them get there rather fast. Obviously, there are always a few outliers who need a little bit of extra-nudging and extra-help to stay in line, but those are usually the ones who often also need that sort of assistance in other areas so that's okay.

git log --first-parent gives you a nice linear history of (generally) your top level merge commits. If you follow a PR workflow, it's PR-by-PR breakdown of activity. The DAG gives you the power to "explore the spiderweb" if want/need to, but also pull back and say "give me the high level over" (--first-parent). I still think a lot of the emphasis on rebase-only workflows would disappear if more of the graphic UI tools (including and especially GitHub) had a better --first-parent experience by default. With the GitHub PR flow it has always surprised me that the main commit log isn't just a --first-parent view with an optional drilldown experience.

Maybe the advantage is for people who use graphical tools? I'm still in the stone age using Git in bash.

Thanks.

You never rebase something into something else, you rebase onto something. I suppose you meant you want to rebase feature branch onto master.

If you have conflicts, you'll have them anyway, regardless if you're merging feature branch into master, merging master into feature branch or rebasing feature branch onto master. Conflicts are not a consequence of rebasing.

When I pull from main (git pull origin develop) there are rarely conflicts. When there are they are easy to understand and fix. Clicking squash on my request hides all intermediate commits so history stays clear in any case.

When I try to rebase from main (git pull --rebase origin develop) often almost every file in the project is in conflict, and the conflicts themselves are incomprehensible. I then run rebase --abort and go back to the merge strategy.

I've tried this about four times in the last few years; no one is able to explain what went wrong. If I had to guess it may have something to do with me pushing the branch when creating it.

    git checkout master     
    git pull             => fetch and merge the new things on master
    git checkout develop => go back to your work branch
    git rebase master    => simple rebase, no squash, no nothing. The conflicts are the same as you'd get with git merge

    git push origin --force develop => to update your branch on the server

There's a bunch of resources on that and once you wrap your head around what git is doing it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to navigate conflicts.

In many cases also there are problems with git being line oriented rather than token oriented, IMHO I would have expected language aware diffs (for definition of "words" and maybe parenthesis) for common languaged to be common place by now (maybe even with a language server support)

In my team we are lucky as most conflict are a matter of simply choosing a side and overwriting the other.

Yes, this is true. But in a lot of cases this is a relatively trivial fix. That being said, I do think git could do better here. But I have not had it happen very often (and usually I know when it's about to happen so I know what to expect).

> In many cases also there are problems with git being line oriented rather than token oriented, IMHO I would have expected language aware diffs (for definition of "words" and maybe parenthesis) for common languages to be common place by now (maybe even with a language server support)

Language aware diffs would be a neat idea indeed, but I guess the issue may be that now git would need to have metadata to tell it which language server to use for which file.

I wonder if it would be possible to give git a plugin system for diffs, just have an option to offload to a diff program which could handle the metadata separately.

Often it is simple but it is tricky and hard to practice. Part of the problem is not git fault, it is just that thinking in diffs is not easy.

> metadata to tell it which language server to use for which file

My understanding is that git already does this (via filename or custom helpers) for binary/text files, I believe that it is used only for newline conversion, but for most usecases filename-based rules in a gitignore derived syntax would be enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580478

Regarding the second point - if you have a rebase-based work-flow, you will encounter this problem less often (or not at all).

For your third point - what helped me a lot is to actively distinguish between commits and the working tree, and making myself aware that branches really are just "pointers" to commits (obviously, but somehow, actively thinking about it made the intent of git commands a lot easier to understand). Also, most git commands are just combinations of other commands. git reset is just moving the pointer (--soft without touching the working tree, --hard will do so), rebase is essentially a hard-reset with consecutive cherry-picks afterwards, and so on.

Also, an eye opener for me personally has been that e.g. an interactive rebase with squash towards a branch that is strictly ahead of you except for the commits you want to rebase is essentially just a "git reset --soft <target>", and then recommitting everything with a fancy commit-message. This and similar mental gymnastics with git-commands has helped me a lot; most of them really are quite sane (except for all those crazy options), "git checkout" is really the odd-one-out of the bunch (and "git pull" a combination of things that should never have been combined in the first place).

I really am not sure if you were being sarcastic or are really that unaware what a mish-mash of specialized jargon you just threw at the guy.

Don't think you the proponents actually understand the problem. It's not that programmers are unwilling to learn (something that many elitistic people love to pretend so they look smarter), it's something called tool fatigue. You just want your tools to do their job and move out of the way which GIT absolutely does not do.

I know that one day I'll get completely sick of GIT and will research and learn it to the bone. Sure, it's bound to happen. But the fact that GIT imposes its internal data model on you and doesn't attempt to solve more problems for you from the get go is what many of us are ticked off about.

I was not :P But the commenter also said in the linked comment that they "understand how git works", so I took the liberty to make a few assumptions ;)

> But the fact that GIT imposes its internal data model on you

It does, to some degree, but once you get a grip of "everyday commands" that go beyond commit/merge (cherry-pick, rebase, reset, reflog), it's actually almost surprising how little you have to know about gits internals. It does help to have an idea about them, though.

My main complaint about git is that most commands have too many options that make it do too many different things. And that resolving conflicts via command line is absolutely atrocious (something I actively avoid and discourage).

> I know that one day I'll get completely sick of GIT and will research and learn it to the bone

I can only recommend it! It's really not that hard as many people suspect (as I've mentioned, I have a bit of a habit of teaching people git at work). If you had any exposure to something computer science in the past, the puzzle pieces probably start to come together after some hours.

And it's probably one of the longer-lasting constants in our industry, so in my opinion, it's really worth it to know how to make good use of it.

Also: In a discussion where one party is being helpful and the other sullenly sarcastic, it's not the helpful one that comes off as an asshole.

My dev team uses git properly. They are not some masters in a way that they know each command by heart. They often use visual tools or what is built into IDE. We just have general guidelines and everyone knows how to do basic moves like "get code from remote", "merge others work into your local changes".

We had people who always have problems like "GIT ate my homework", well they don't work with us anymore so maybe it is a selection bias.

But I don't think my team members were NOT studying git for months to get to that level, it just came as they go along. Visual tools help a lot really.

In the end I expect someone with any abstract thinking capabilities to be able to use GIT "properly" after a week of working within the team. Like pull new changes every day, create new branch, create a pull request, merge new changes into your working branch.

The parent's point still stands: No one is out there choosing to use git in "unpredictable" ways.

If someone is a software developer, for me basic requirement is having possibility to understand this.

No, its not. The alternative is not to.

Time is not free. Learning a tool properly is an investment. Sometimes that's worth it and sometimes its not. E.g. i would never advise anyone to take the time to learn dc properly.

Yes. Or at least, avoid learning anything if they can help it, treating it as a black box that can never be understood. "Learn got properly" just means "actually make an effort to learn the tool rather that clinging to learned helplessness".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580478

Perfectly explained here : https://xkcd.com/1597/

[1]: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

[1]: https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/diff-highligh...

I slightly tweaked the default config and it is great.

    [core]
     pager = delta
    [interactive]
     diffFilter = delta --color-only
    [delta]
     features = navigate
     hunk-header-style = omit
     line-numbers = true
     line-numbers-left-format = "{nm:>3} "
     line-numbers-right-format = "{np:>3} "
     max-line-length = 0

  git config --global alias.meld '!git difftool -t meld --dir-diff'

  git meld                   # like "git diff"
  git meld --staged          # like "git diff --staged"
  git meld branchA branchB   # like "git diff branchA branchB"

Or maybe just don't shame people for not working the way you do.

> You can do the same with the new one, but the flag is -c: git switch -c new_branch

It's like they had a design meeting where they discussed this and said "so I propose switch -b newbranch to create and switch to a new branch" and the objection was "nah that would make it consistent with checkout, which is against the project policy"

The whole point of adding git switch and git restore is to come up with more user friendly porcelain. Otherwise we might as well stick with git checkout. git checkout is maximally consistent with git checkout!

Because you can "checkout" other stuff too, not just branches.

> But consistency is more important so it’s better to keep consistency than “correctness” here imo.

Huh? I thought the whole point of these new commands was to try and fix the old illogical command line interface. Since one of the main problems -- probably the main problem -- is precisely the lack of consistency, the new ones logically just cannot be consistent with all the old ones, because then they would be just as inconsistent among themselves as the old ones. Something somewhere has to give. (And IMO this "-b" seems as good a candidate for the chop as any.)

But is that the case? Won’t this just be used in addition to the old commands (except checkout)?

The worst case would be adding commands that attempt to fix an UX but which don’t replace it, creating two separate UXes you must use at the same time. Anyone who uses the Windows control panel knows.

Dunno. (Elsewhere in this thread, the guy who built them reported that he isn't on the git dev team any more, so perhaps not too promising.)

> Won’t this just be used in addition to the old commands (except checkout)?

That's still a massive improvement, since checkout was arguably the main culprit. Also, it was never the case that you'd have to replace all git commands to achieve consistency: Many (hopefully most) already had consistent naming of arguments and options. So make your new ones compatible with the largest set of internally-consistent ones already present, and you only need to replace a minority. (Worst case, if all N were incompatible with each other, you'd have to replace N-1 -- but you could still keep one. :-)

Then there's also usage frequency to consider. Given that checkout is the command most inconsistent with others, often inconsistent even with itself, and among the very most used ones overall -- almost certainly, in my estimation, the most used of the candidates for replacement -- I'd say even if nothing more comes of this, it's a huge net win.

Also note that it's not a case of "two separate UXes you must use at the same time": git checkout is still there; no piece of the "old control panel" has -- AFAIK, or has any? -- been disabled or removed.

The only reason I bothered commenting is your comment pretty much called them stupid because their decision didn't line up with what you would have done.

The fundamental problem with this UX is that it (like so many Unix tools) doesn’t draw a hard line between interactive use and scripting use, so making large changes is out of the question since the interactive UX is already scripted in thousands of aliases and CI scripts. That’s a different topic though.

You're expecting the impossible. The current set of commands isn't great, everyone agrees on that, but they're too engraved in the minds of millions of developers to change. Thus, to solve the problem, the git developers come up with a new set of commands. By definition they won't be consistent with the current set of commands, as they're meant to solve the problems the current set has.

You have an issue with the new commands not being compatible, but you also have an issue with the old commands, that the new commands would replicate if they were compatible. What do you actually expect the developers to do?

If there is more to this retooling project than meets the eye (in this article) then great. My fear is that it’s more inconsistent aggregation, again - but it’s not obviously the case of course.

There are plenty of git wrappers that offer a cleaner API; you are totally free to use any of those, write your own, or to ditch Git altogether. Or is your beef with all of programmerdom, for choosing git as the platform for open source dev?

This is hacker news. It’s basically a few thousand armchairs. Welcome.

> You assume there is no design process.

I’m not saying that. I was just a few minutes ago explaining how I have tried to see traces of it. From the software itself there aren’t any obvious signs of (long term) UX design.

> the most successful VCS software in existence

Lots of stuff is wildly successful despite being an aggregated ball of mud (php, js, unix, c++…). Good (intuitive, consistent) UX is in no way required for popularity or success.

> There are plenty of git wrappers that offer a cleaner API; you are totally free to use any of those, write your own, or to ditch Git altogether. Or is your beef with all of programmerdom, for choosing git as the platform for open source dev?

The fact that none of them are popular I think is due to the problem with such extensions, that soon enough you have to write something portable (a CI script for example) that runs on vanilla git.

> Or is your beef with all of programmerdom, for choosing git as the platform for open source dev?

I like git, and I hate git. Git is simultaneusky hideous and awesome. I really really hope git isn’t the end of VCS, even though it’s now one of the better ones.

> your language has been more judgmental than concern

Fair point. I do enjoy pissing on things that look or feel Unix-y

Uh... Git was created by the guy who created Linux.

Initially to help manage distributed Linux dev. Not forced on anyone other than Linux devs. Not dominant through nefarious business practices like MS Windows, but because it spread *organically* overtaking other "well designed" systems. People voted with their feet.

Seems unreasonable:

* The problem with the "taped together ball of aggregated mud" is that commands and switches are illogical and inconsistent.

* These new commands are an attempt to fix that by introducing a set of (AIUI) parallel commands with better internal consistency.

* And now your complaint is that the new ones aren't consistent with the old ones?

No, of fucking course they aren't consistent with the old inconsistent ones. That's the whole point: If they were consistent with the inconsistent ones, they would also be inconsistent.

carrying over flags whose abbreviated forms don't make any sense in the new context doesn't make anything easier for anybody. if you want to keep using the commands you have memorized, you can do that - just don't use switch or restore. the new commands are different, that's the point.

    git restore test.txt

(Every non-official build is made from a separate branch.)

It's apparently a business requirement to keep every branch around forever, and I'll just take your word for that. At that point, you can have an `origin` remote where work happens, and the CI can include a push to an `archive` remote which is append-only.

Lets you have a development environment where the existence of a branch on origin means that it's in-play, and everything exists on archive if it proves needful.

Git checkout and a few other commands also use it to separate branch and the rest of paths, because you could specify like this

    git checkout branch path1 path2
    git checkout path1 path2
    git checkout branch # what if there's a file named "branch"?

    git checkout branch -- # always checkout a branch
    git checkout -- path1 path2 # always checkout paths
    git checkout branch -- path1 path2 # same, but disable disambiguation logic

From the article, I was thinking that it was again a stupid confusing design for the cli to requires the -- even with a dedicated command.

One main issue with git is to not be consistent and logic with the comments. Always to use different way or option abbreviation for different command. For example having a space or a slash between repo and a branch in a command.

  ls -file
  ls "-file"

Actually, this one makes sense, once you understand the underlying model of how git works with remote repositories, which (imo) is fairly fundamental to a distributed VCS.

They're different arguments (in your words, having a space) when you're accessing remote repositories and have to specify the location it should access. You can always substitute an URL for a repo in this case, and they fail if you cannot connect to the remote repository.

In all other cases (having a slash), you're referencing a ref in your local repository. This is a local copy of the remote repository. That means that it always works offline, but also that it doesn't sync with the remote repository. You can also substitute another ref, such as a "local" branch.

git fetch origin main

git rebase -i origin/main

Git push origin localBranch:remoteBranch

For example, why not:

git push origin/remoteBranch localBranch

(And if you want to preserve saying that slash is just for local, you could say: origin:remoteBranch)

So I can explain how git works in great detail, but ask me how to perform an action I haven't in a month, and it's a lot like figuring our a tar command.

+ git switch is documented as "EXPERIMENTAL"

+ git --help lists git switch but not git checkout as an important command

This is a documentation inconsistency. It can't be both the canonical interface to use and experimental at the same time.

When you checkout a specific commit and are now in detached HEAD state, you are by default given the message

    If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
    do so (now or later) by using -c with the switch command. Example:

      git switch -c <new-branch-name>

    Or undo this operation with:

      git switch -

A much better response would be, "Thanks for pointing that out! I have filed an issue." One can't simultaneously through shade for not being community-spirited while expecting other people to do all the work.

In any case, the suggestion of submitting a patch when you notice a problem doesn’t deserve downvotes. That’s not throwing shade, at all.

If you do that work, I'm glad to try to help you see where their approach falls short in terms of sincerely encouraging contribution.

I'm not being coy, as if I really know what you think, but I'm asking anyway just to be frustrating. I mean, I have an idea, but I also didn't want to make assumptions about your intent, when it's just as easy to ask you to elaborate. After all, it's your point that it was incorrect, so I just wanted to know why.

Any way, you said there are "legitimate ways to suggest submitting a patch, but this isn't one" (I'm paraphrasing). To me that didn't really make sense, because that implies one of the wrong ways to suggest submitting a patch is to suggest submitting a patch.

> If that's really the case, then take a little time and explain exactly what impact you think that comment would have had on the person they were replying to

In my mind, it seems like the effect that it would have on them is to suggest to them to submit a patch. Alternatively, it might also have no effect, because they might not care enough to do anything about it, or just be busy, which is also ok. They don't have to listen to any advice, and it was given in good faith, without malice.

I can also imagine a situation where it is technically possible for someone to attribute all sort of weird malice to "so submit a patch" that wasn't actually there. After all, people can feel however they want. However, in my opinion it's quite rude to assume about someone without knowing them that they're such a fragile creature as to invent malcontent where there is, in my eyes, obviously none.

So going back to when I said "I have an idea", I meant that yeah I can imagine, after this back and fourth, that maybe you would assume something like this about someone else - that they can't hear "so submit a patch" without taking it en every wrong way possible - but I didn't want to make that assumption without at least giving you the opportunity to explain yourself.

Ok, on to exploring other ways to encourage them to submit a patch. You could say, "Do you know you can submit a patch?", "Feel free to submit a patch", "This looks like a documentation bug, would you submit a patch?". All of these also seem fine to me.

> If you do that work, I'm glad to try to help you see where their approach falls short in terms of sincerely encouraging contribution.

What I don't like about this, personally, is that you're convinced their suggestion wasn't sincere, as if there has to be an ulterior motive. As if believing that a programmer on a startup forum is capable of fixing a documentation bug is so crazy, there can be no other explanation than really they were trying to humiliate the other person.

Any way, I do believe that you're trying to be helpful and it's not really that big of a deal so no worries. Hope you can believe me when I say I'm being sincere as well. Basically, a lot of people have different ways of encouraging each other, and there are a lot of different styles of encouragement that people appreciate. It doesn't mean that one you don't agree with is wrong. When I read "so submit a patch", my mind didn't immediately go negative, and I hope the recipient of that didn't either.

If I wanted to actually invite somebody to contribute to an open-source project, I'd start with positive reinforcement. "Great point! That's definitely an issue with the docs." I'd then first tell them how to let the right people know about the problem. "You can file an issue here Be sure to categorize it as X, mentioning Y, and Z." Then I would explain that if they wanted to get involved in the project, they could try submitting a patch, giving them at least a few sentences of instruction on what files to look at, where to find the contributor guidelines, etc. In sum, if I'm asking somebody to do work, I'd encourage them and do a little work myself to show that I'm trying to support them.

And it's not just me. The "submit a patch" bit is a cliche bit of jerkiness, so much so that there are whole discussions of it. For example this: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6874...

And this: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8323...

And it's a long-standing problem in open source. This, for example, is more than 10 years old: https://xenoterracide.com/post/dont-say-patches-welcome/

So if that reply truly seems fine to you, please understand that if it ever was, it has been ruined by a long history of people acting like that to be dismissive or jerky. That rudeness is something I can almost excuse in someone actually working on an open-source project, as they can get a raw deal. But I think there's no place at all for it in a forum like this.

This means, here's my problem, someone else fix it for me. Since it has not been fixed for YEARS, maybe not the best alternative if you want to get it fixed.

The Git project has no issue tracker though.

Never heard of switch /restore and will probably forget about it the next time I'm on the terminal.

Rebase and interactive Rebase is so well integrated for my use cases and I feel much more productive without having to switch context.

Reflog and bisect are when I nowadays switch to the terminal, have not discovered an equivalent last time I checked.

This IntelliJ integration is the source of quite a lot of git problems in teams I worked with.

I'm quite flabbergasted by this - devs claim to know git on their CV, come in and know what "commit" is and how to use the IntelliJ UI, but don't even understand what its doing. And everyone is acting like it's OK and learning git is a "hard thing ill never need" and we should all use sourcetree or jetbrains. Or people just get so used to it and never understand what exists below it. They lose all sense of what they're doing and just think "the machine knows what I want". Then a vaguely questioned dialog appears - or something similar - and they cause clusterfuck upon their branch - or sometimes even other people's remote branches.

How do we allow our culture to be so lazy that people resist using one of the basic tools because "oh its hard I gotta remember 5 commands" and we find it OK? No wonder the plane is burning.

It's good that you still know that reflog exists, because a lot of "inteliij is my git client" users don't even know about it. Tho I'm still wondering, isn't it faster/easier to open intelliJ terminal and type a command or two than having to ope a whole new window and click around it? (also sorry if this sounds like an attack on you, it isn't! just really wondering!)

Also, re: OP: So basically 2 new commands were added that do what other commands already do, but people dont read the docs so we should add new commands so maybe people will read the docs for them?

Its probably a rhetorical question but I think its worth answering anyway.

Experienced developers had the luxury of learning git, say, over a 10 year period. I certainly know a lot more git than 10 years ago.

If you are a new developer thrown into your first real project and Intellij handles git for you so that you can concentrate on being productive then learning command line git takes a back seat.

I see this in many aspects of programming. One thing I am struggling with currently, is that JHipster generates applications in a user friendly way. JHipster is highly productive and seems like the future of programming BUT it means that there will be a generation of programmers that do not understand the MB of Spring Java code that is casually puked out by the code generator.

Its depressing to say it, but I think not understanding the tools is only natural and is probably the new normal in this age of complexity.

The depressing thing is I'm not talking just about off-the-shelf newbies, I'm also talking about experienced devs.

>Its depressing to say it, but I think not understanding the tools is only natural and is probably the new normal in this age of complexity.

Yes, unfortunately, this is becoming the new normal. But what is the next "new normal" after this? More complexity and obscurity? How long can we keep building that house of cards before it collapses upon us?

I use the basic git commands a lot but the wider set not very often.

So maybe I should learn Git from first principles every year? Like a cop would practice at the firing range?

But I’m doing that on my own time. But then what about the 1000 other things from Dockerfiles, to Relational database query plan optimisation, to the latest azure cloud offerings, to the newest React library for managing state, etc. etc.

The "cognitive burden" of git comes as much from the tasks that it is occasionally required to make possible than anything else.

If the only git commands you ever use are push, pull, commit and checkout then its a very simple system with very little cognitive burden. But one day, you may need to perform a truly complex task with git that a simpler system with much less cognitive burden would just not allow.

I do not understand how "data interchange formats" are an issue here. What do you want to inter-operate with?

Note that we're specifically discussing the theoretical reason for git's usability woes. The costs of actually fixing them in git aren't trivial, of course.

We'll see if JHipster and their ilk are really the new building blocks. A lot of the older RAD development tools have also gone the way of the dinosaur. For sure the new primitives will be higher level and allow us to build more complex applications, it's just a matter of time before we'll find our which ones have to most expressive power and ergonomics, and which turn out to be giant hairballs.

It is literally impossible for us to understand how everything we use works. We expect a compiler to just compile things and work; nobody is ranting about how modern developers are lazy because they can't hand-verify the compiler is outputting the right opcodes. Nobody is ranting about how web developers are lazy because they can't debug a browser runtime and its interface to the OS's rendering primitives. Can some people do those things? Sure. Do we imply character flaws for the 98% of developers who have focused on other things? No.

If this old-man-yells-at-clouds, good-enough-for-grandpa-so-its-good-enough-for-me style were the dominant approach in our industry, we'd still be working with punch cards and fanfold printer output. Thank goodness it isn't. Instead of having a million developers adapt to git, git should adapt to the million developers and free up their time for doing something that actually matters to a user.

How should git adapt? Can you get a simpler model than this? Is really a basic structure like a tree so complicated millions of developers are having a hard time with it?

Nobody is advocating for "dont use new stuff, old is betteer". Nobody is advocating for people to hand-check compiler outputs (unless your analogy pertains to people who work in a GUI tool that shows them pretty pictures for opcodes and they check if the pictures match).

You've missed the point.

The point is "try to understand the basics of the tool you are using".

If me wanting people to learn and understand more makes me an asshole, so be it.

I'd rather be an asshole and help people learn more and understand more than coddle them in the safety of the pretty buttons and say "it's ok, you don't have to understand".

If we don't understand our tools and the problems they solve, how will we make progress?

How will we make better tools?

How will we make better software?

How do you learn and grow if not by understanding what you don't?

That you can't tell the difference between "let's make software more usable" and "nobody should learn anything ever again and just soften into blobs of undifferentiated protoplasm" seems like a you problem.

Git is a very complicated, bloated command line. Frankly, most of the day-to-day can easily be done with a high level understanding and a GUI. There is no shame in not knowing the minutiae of git.

The goal of being a programmer is to produce cool things, not to duel with your tooling.

So much so that you can write your own basic version of git in a couple of hours: https://wyag.thb.lt/

Yes, you can write C without understanding poinnters, you can paint without understanding colors and how they mix, draw without knowing difference between 3H and 2B, use a drill without knowing which type of head is for what.

But try doing it long term and you either gotta learn those things or your output will be limited and clear expression of your vision will be harder.

I'm not advocating for people to learn git from scratch.

I'm advocating for understanding - not low level, at least high level.

And is it better to go through a "how to use X tool in Y GUI" tutorial or how to use "X tool" and then gain immediate understanding of what Y does? What if you switch GUI's? Which knowledge will be sticking?

The same applies to the git CLI. And really, to git. The right tool for a small group C-using kernel developers 15 years ago may not be the right tool for different people doing different things today. Let's hope it goes the way of C.

My experience is that knowing the DAG in GIT is equivalent to needing to know pointers to write effective C.

Knowing the internals is more like needing to know assembly in C. Yes, it can be really useful for debugging certain classes of problems, but not really necessary in day-to-day work.

I've used git professionally for 4 years now and haven't once run into a corrupted repo or a problem googling for help couldn't solve. Day to day driver is TortoiseGit, which is frankly just a shitty TortoiseSVN skin on top of git. But I like being able to visually see the graph since at the end of the day I'm doing graph operations when manipulating the repo.

It sounds a lot like you mean low-level, not high-level, though?

There’s more than enough to be achieved by just knowing the tree concept of git, and using a GUI to visualize it while running the basics - checkout, commit, branch, rebase, etc.

Oh, that's exactly what I meant. At least basic, high level understanding of the git model and basic operations on it. But most people never even get to rebasing or try do understand what lies behind magical buttons in the GUI.

It's hard to see the gaps someone else has, and wonder why they can't know what you know, but they may have some deep knowledge in a domain you are only superficially knowledgable in.

I agree we need to nail the basics, but this isn't 2002 anymore, and we don't ship Gold CDs to customers by running a build command on a single PC in the office. Our jobs are so much more complex and multi-faceted, and the oldbeard assumption that things are 'bare essentials' is eroded by the pragmatic realisation that we only have so many hours in the day.

You can use top-down knowledge to inform yourself on what concepts you need to learn, and you can ignore the parts of the domain you need right now. But you still have to learn them bottom up. Getting confused by the concepts you're using is a gigantic waste of time.

And the harder the concepts, the easier it is to get confused, so there's no trade-off.

Actually, I'm trying to look at it more from a "shallow sea" perspective - you have a problem and are given a tool to solve it. But do you not dive in just a bit to see "hey what is this tool" after you solve the problem?

Or after using it for a while?

UI is also something you have to learn how to use.

Sourcetree UI is as complicated as terminal for someone who never used it.

>I have to deliver products and deliverables, when and what do I focus on wrt gaps in my knowledge? Git? Unix commands? OWASP Security principles? Cache busting? global state management? ORM integrations with popular DBs? Kubernetes configs?

With that mentality, what do you ever learn?

Do you just keep on chugging year after year with "duct-tape the tools"?

Where is the joy in that? Where is the growth?

Are you always in a rush to deliver software without a moment to think?

You learn about the level you're using - like, are you using git daily? Just reading a tutorial or two and spending 5 mins a day with it in the terminal is going to do wonders for understanding it long-term.

>Barely understanding many fundamental tools is common these days for devs

It's common for someone starting to develop or starting to use a tool - hell, 8 years ago I have been as confused as "wtf is this git" as anyone.

Gradle was magic to me. Terminal was a dark and scary place.

That doesn't mean that it is okay to stay at that level.

If we accept "not trying to understand" as the new common, then we accept failure and ignorance as the new common.

We accept the world of broken software because people don't understand what they're doing - and we're telling them "you don't need to understand so don't even bother".

And hell, maybe that's gatekeeping, but fuck it, I'll rather be St. Peter at the gates than accept a world where learning and understanding is something "we don't have time for".

> With that mentality, what do you ever learn?

The way I understand it, this comment is saying you have to prioritize and work on the highest-impact areas. Of course you grow, but until a certain point you don't benefit much from knowing the guts of git more than Framework X.

I have never experienced any joy of creativity from using git, so it's not something I'm putting high on my list. Heck, learning Rust was 10x as good for my development as git, so I don't regret prioritizing that way.

I expect (hope?) that most people understand the git they use in their daily workflow... but that doesn't mean they have to have mastered every dark corner. Find a specialist (Stack Overflow :) when an unusual situation arises. If it's happening consistently, then I agree some more learning should occur.

>With that mentality, what do you ever learn?

>Where is the joy in that? Where is the growth?

>Are you always in a rush to deliver software without a moment to think?

There's nothing sexy about learning git commands for me

I'd rather spend that time on actual computer science fundamentals or even reading stuff like HTTP RFC than learning git quirks

The rest I do on the command line because I don’t want to forget — except commits because I’m not at risk of forgetting “git commit -m”.

I think a quick skim of the available features in the docs would probably give a good overview. Then poking around.

I haven't felt a need for a git gui but I might give this a try anyhow.

For me, I used to use the terminal git, and I still do occasionally. But I use Sourcetree now for most things because I make less mistakes seeing the tree visually all the time.

My job isn’t to use git, it’s to write specialist software. If I get the software written and the customer is happy, it doesn’t matter whether I use <ide> or not. Imagine having 100 complex things bouncing around your head and having to make that 101 when you forget the order of arguments to merge.

The guy who knows every command of git backwards is welcome to apply for a job managing a git repo or something if such a thing exists? But I could harp on the same way about his missing MATLAB or firmware skills.

I'm also not sure referring to people as "noobs" is going to help you empathize with their difficulty. ;)

I remember being in programming and software related IRCs at 10-11 years old having no earthly clue what in the fuck I was doing, asking adults questions and getting called a "noob".

Well, yeah, it was true. (I also made damn sure they had no idea I was a child.)

They could have said "inexperienced person" but that's not got quite the same ring and people are lazy, aye? Haha

Examples:

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/noob

* https://www.etymonline.com/word/noob

Examples not containing the negative connotation:

* https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noob

* https://neologisms.rice.edu/index.php?a=term&d=1&t=2471

It might be something used quite differently by two similar groups, so it is good to be aware that other people may use it the other way.

Every problem I have to troubleshoot is almost by definition one I've never encountered before.

The best example of this was when I worked with a project with 12 dev teams that didn't rebase. They asked me where a commit came from, and when I ran 'git log --oneline --graph' the output was all pipes across my (maximized) terminal.

I've never seriously gotten into the 'plumbing' of git, so can't claim to have a 'true' vision of git via the CLI, but I've never yet been in a situation where it's been required.

Who defines which tools are "basic tools of the trade" and which are just bland infrastructure?

And who decides how much of each tool one should know to move beyond "daily incompetence"?

If I'm getting the job done and produce more net value than my peers for my salary, why should there be requirements on how well I know some specific tool?

I'm willing to bet a ton of value has been generated by folks who don't know the first thing about git beyond "commit, push, pull request". Who cares?

Now, of course, whatever my core job role is (perhaps it is firmware development, as in your example), I should know that role inside and out if my output is going into safety-critical places. But that's a different comment all together.

> Who defines which tools are "basic tools of the trade" and which are just bland infrastructure?

Well, if so many people routinely have so much difficulty with it as these comments witness, it can hardly be called "bland."

This is also why there was so so much fuss about git GUI client, there were looking for a golden hammer, a GUI that would do everything and anything.

Sometimes I read these things and end up saying to myself "Wow, that company just literally hates being productive"

The more tools people are allowed to install and use, the less standardised software development. Meanwhile we didn't even have common source code formatting pattern and single Java class could be formatted with tabs, 2 spaces and 4 spaces.

  EDITOR=joe git commit

I would never brush off a team member with “cannot help you”. I’m a git expert and I will figure out what’s wrong and fix it.

- use the same terminology as git

- show a log of every command

- default to sane behavior

- ask preferences instead of assuming (ex: rebase or merge?)

- show warnings when doing something destructive or unusual

I've found that I now spend zero time learning and thinking about git anymore, and it also protects our repos from git noobs at the same time.

- Want a diff between two commits from two different branches? Click one commit and Ctrl+click the other. All the diffs show up immediately.

- Messed something up badly and you need to see the reflog? Click the Recyclable Commits checkbox, and everything in the reflog shows up just like any normal commit. And you can use the diff trick above on them.

- Wonder what's in your stashes that you forgot about? Click the Stashes checkbox and they all show up as normal commits. Because that's what a stash really is.

- Committed something to the wrong branch? Drag the branch markers to where you want them.

Even if it’s exceptionally wonky, I have absolutely no problem introducing git to new devs, as long as it’s alongside a graphical representation (sourcetree or some ide-extension), and as long as I am able to enforce limitations on what commands can be run on the git CLI (or more realistically, disallow push to master, and force every merge/rebase through a review)

I’ve personally found that it’s trivial to understand how IDEs integrate git and then adapt the workflow around that, but it’s a complete clusterfuck to let self-proclaimed git wizards loose on a repo without any structure..

always did give me a chuckle how it took off the way it did for projects that don't come even remotely close to the scalability (like tree sizes) it provides.

the facts that it's free, fast, reliable, good for offline operation and can be used for huge and tiny projects alike are nice though. just never expected to see the day when web designers would become religious about using it.

Git probably has its place, but only on very specific, large scale projects, with a crack core team and hundreds of drive-by contributors ?

So, hypothetically, if that were the case, what is the recommendation for Small/Medium web agencies?

On a more serious note, I wonder if GP ever worked on projects outside of large enterprises and is just gatekeeping it. Git is useful on solo projects, for God's sake.

HG is simpler to understand, has a more consistent CLI, and way better error messaging. Just a pity that it's been so sorely overshadowed by the Swiss Army Chainsaw of VCS.

Git can certainly do almost anything/everything anybody might want from a VCS, but, just like a chainsaw, it'll cut your leg off just as soon as it'll cut off the branch you're pruning if you're not fully expert in using it.

Why not just say the truth "I could help you, but it's not my job, so I'm not going to"

Maybe, but most Git GUIs don't provide clear error messages. This is the case of VSCode, which my teamates keep using. When you use Git CLI you can just have the original error message and know what's wrong.

I was also burned by sourcetree some years ago where it lost part of my code while doing a merge I didn't even understand.

I am not a Git expert. But I can remember the 5 commands needed to do my job every day: `commit`, `push`, `pull`, `rebase`, `checkout`. (you can also add `add` and `status` to the list if you want)

They're straighforward, except for `checkout` which is adressed by `switch` for the main usage.

If you use it wrong, Git CLI will tell you in most of the cases, and even tell you how to do what you intented to do. Git GUIs will probably tell you something wrong happened and left you at that or try to be more intelligent than you are and do something wrong.

> Isn't that just being incredibly lazy.

-> this is what I'd answer to do those Git GUIs.

> Isn't that just being incredibly lazy.

-> this is what I'd say to people who won't write these 5 commands on a sticky note or something and keep it for a month before realizing it wasn't hard to remember once you _commit_ to it and that Git is not hard, minus exceptional problems but Git GUIs absolutely won't help you with these exceptional problems.

And second, what exactly mystifies you about what e.g. SourceTree menu commands do? They map clearly and intuitively to CLI commands.

If you have "no idea" what it's trying to do then you're not even trying to be helpful. You're just being condescending.

What we need to do is get passed this ridiculous mindset some have that not knowing something is a bad thing. We all have to start off somewhere and “noob” is just a common term for describing that. Case in point: I’ll readily post “noob question guys, how do I…?” on Slack to give context that I’m asking a potentially basic question and basically don’t really know what I’m doing. For reference, I am the most senior on my team and yet I have zero issue highlighting stuff I don’t know when asking for help. And that’s exactly the way it should be.

There’s no shame in being new at something. What there should be is shame in wanting to mock newbies and shaming and those who don’t offer up their help to others. Being a noob should be celebrated as someone new joining the team rather than added to our dictionary of inappropriate terms.

Anyway, I’ve been the “resident git expert” before, and even just supporting competent CLI users is miserable once the team grows beyond 30 or so people. I can’t imagine trying to then reverse engineer and debug a half dozen crappy GUIs.

Optimizing everything around developers that can’t figure out the CLI sounds like a great way to attract bozos (both by admitting bozos and by chasing non-bozos out).

What about people who have totally figured out the CLI but still prefer to use a GUI?

I don't get why people act like it's either/or.

I read it more as, I don't want to be become L1 Tech Support for something I don't know either.

Computers are sufficiently advanced that there will always be blind spots in your team. Sometimes that means working together as a team to figure them out. Which is the kind of behaviour a good manager should encourage and the sort of attitude a good senior engineer should have already learned.

If they fix it, do they then become responsible for fixing it in future? Is this now a "responsibility" the "company" (coworkers) expects of them, with no compensation? In addition to their existing responsibilities?

I introduced git to the company I'm at (previously on SVN running on an old beige box in the corner). It made collaboration easier. I accepted the fact I'll get pinged whenever someone makes git do a weird thing, but I'm lucky that for the most part coworkers learn from these incidents rather than coming back each time with the same issues.

There should also be schemes in place to help people level up their own skills. Whether it’s organised training days or an acknowledgment that x number of hours a sprint is spent on personal development (A Cloud Guru or whatever).

If a company doesn’t set up those two pillars then they risk creating toxic teams and that’s ultimately more harmful for productivity than any lost time in a given day helping a peer with version control.

Source: been a hiring manager at several companies. Seen what works and what doesn’t. Ultimately a closer team almost always out performs one where individuals are only looking out for themselves.

Unfortunately, a word needs to exist that stands in for this:

"Person, who isn't so different than myself when I started, with little experience who is mistake prone due to the lack of experience, who's mistakes creates disruption and often great expense at the most inconvenient times."

Being offended by noob just makes communication more difficult, and does not really change anything. We've had all kinds of much more offensive names for the same thing (many other names imply race, social status and so on). noob seems to be about as offensive as rookie, but one syllable less.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Noob

> Contrary to the belief of many, a noob/n00b and a newbie/newb are not the same thing. Newbs are those who are new to some task* and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage. n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more. They expect people to do the work for them and then expect to get praised about it

The specifics of the definition probably vary depending on who you ask but that's roughly it.

Now it's fine to joke around and call yourself a noob, that's just self-deprecating.

But if you're talking about other people and don't want to inadvertently offend, stick to "newbie" in speech or "newbie/newb" in writing, which have a connotation entirely of "beginner" as opposed to "idiot".

(Of course, if you're among friends where you enjoy making fun of each other, say whatever you want!)

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/noob

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbie#Connotations_of_variant...

> My job isn’t to use git, it’s to write specialist software.

I’m a big fan of automation, but there are certain fundamental tools I think one needs to understand to do the job. Both because you should have some idea what the automation is there to accomplish and also to get yourself out of a pickle when something goes wrong (or to even recognize when that happens!).

So, as I think most people would agree: you certainly don’t need to understand the obscure corners of your programming language, but you should have a solid understanding of the fundamentals and a decent overview of the rest.

In the case of source control, and git in particular, IMHO you should have a decent fundamental understanding (which isn’t even particularly complex at a conceptual level) so even if you don’t remember the command for ‘X’ , you’ll know to look for it when you do need it.

Given how you started your comment, perhaps you don’t even agree with implication of the sentence I quoted.

(edit: added IMHO)

Things like version control should be first class tools that we all learn in detail. They are literally the most fundamentally important tools we use every day if we work in a team. You aren't doing your job if you don't care about how your code interacts with your team and your deployment. Like an architect who doesn't know how to use a drafting table.

It's incredibly frustrating that people let their egos stoke them into this idea that tooling is beneath them. It's almost certainly the cause of an incredible amount of bad software, even though much of its code is, I'm sure, quite clever in a vacuum.

And I'd rather work with a hundred programmers who know how to use their tools than one programmer who looks down on them for it.

If you want to try again, the central thesis of my post was:

"Using git (or some kind of version control) is, in fact, your job."

With a digression that amounts to:

"The disdain OP's post shows towards people who take the time to understand the tools fundamental to performing their job is extremely unappealing to me in a coworker" (ie. the "they should get a job managing a git repo or something" part)

Imagine if you knew a cabinet builder who said:

"My job isn't to use a table saw, it's to build beautiful cabinets. If I get the cabinets built and the customer is happy, it doesn't matter whether I use a japanese handsaw or a CNC controlled laser. Imagine having 100 different pieces bouncing around around in your and having to then remember the assembly order."

Now, you might argue that this supports your point, by claiming that it actually doesn't matter whether the carpenter uses a japanese handsaw, table saw or CNC laser cutter. But I'd argue the opposite: it does matter whether the carpenter knows the tools they use as well as possible, because this will affect both the quality & speed of their work, but also the range of possibilities they can even consider. It doesn't matter much which tool they use, as long as they know it intimately and in depth.

I would argue that the same is true of the tools we use as software developers. Pretending that all of the skill lies only in the domain of creating actual lines of code is misleading. If you're using a revision control system, you owe it to yourself, your customers and your colleagues (if any) to be a master of that in the same way that you're a master of the specialist software you're creating.

You chose a strange analogy, because CNC woodworking is far and away the superior choice over hand tools for producing cabinets. CNC cut and drilled wood is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper, more accurate, and allow the cabinet professional to focus on what really matters (installing them properly) rather than wasting huge amounts of time trying to do everything the manual way.

Ironically, this might be a great analogy to support the OP's point: Someone who gets so caught up in the tools and methods and doing everything the manual way for the sake of flexing their knowledge is at risk of wasting a lot of time and energy.

Personally, I have a lot of fun doing things the hard, manual way when I'm working on a hobby project. But when it's time to get work done, I choose the efficient abstractions and tools that let me focus on the core work without wasting time.

What you should not do, IMO, is to say "Oh, I have a CNC system, but I never interact with it directly, I let CNC-Foo on my computer control it whenever I need to do anything".

I have experience with CNC machines, and I would still not recommend that anyone try to control their CNC machine by typing in G-Code directly. Understanding G-code can be helpful, but you really need to learn to use the higher-level tools properly to get anything done.

HN is really strange on the topic of knowing the underlying details of complex systems:

- When the topic of CS interviews comes up, the comment section is irate that companies are testing for low-level knowledge that isn't used in day to day programming tasks. Asking someone to reverse a linked list is blasphemy because we have libraries for that.

- When the topic of Git comes up, the comment section is insistent that the only possible way to use tools is to have intimate working knowledge of the underlying low-level concepts. Insisting that people know the ins and outs of every git command instead of using a GUI is the only acceptable option.

I suspect there's a lot of overlap between the two positions, which boils down to: "I do things a certain way and I'm convinced my way is the correct and only way."

2) After I posted the comment you're replying to, I was absolutely certain that the question of which level of control was appropriate would come up (since that's really what we're discussing in the context of git). It doesn't seem obvious to try to carry the analogy too far, but for both systems there are obviously different levels that one can think about. I haven't used a CNC system, but I would imagine that there are very high level control systems that maybe start from some sort of design data and take it from there, some mid-level control systems that let you specify what you need and then program the machine to create it, and low-level control that would be rarely used unless the higher level tools just couldn't do what was needed.

If indeed this is an accurate description, then it seems to match the case with git quite well, and I'd still argue that even if you often/sometimes use the very high level control tool, you should understand and be aware of the possibilities of the lower level ones too.

I enjoy HN, but I've also been here long enough to accept that HN is an echo chamber. Yes, we have downvotes and a variety of opinions, but the reality is that if you come into certain threads expressing certain unpopular opinions you're going to get hit with a wave of downvotes. Eventually you learn to just stop posting those opinions, which results in an echo chamber effect.

No social media site is free of echo chamber effects. HN is not an exception.

> I haven't used a CNC system, but...

Friendly suggestion: If you're not familiar with how something works, maybe it's not the best subject for an analogy?

As for the echo chamber, you won't be suprised that I disagree with you on this point.

1) I have no way of knowing if they're a domain expert.

2) With 35 years of software development under my belt, and a half dozen version control systems too, I'd consider myself likely to be as much of a domain expert as the OP, and I'm saying the opposite.

3) I am not as master woodworker. I have built cabinets and many other things. Philosophically I consider the disjunction between our culture's attitude towards physical tools (where there's an assumption that one will have to take time to learn how to use the tool before actually being able to make anything good with them) and digital tools (where there's an assumption that apprenticeship should be kept to a minimum, preferably zero) extremely interesting.

4) When I'm working on a task (I also build very specialized, highly complex software) the distinction between the cognitive load caused by the task and the cognitive task caused by the tools I have available to work with is not very big. It doesn't make much different whether the "101st" thing concerns a tool or a component, it's just another part of the big picture that I have to struggle to keep in my head as I move forward.

With gloves it's safer and more comfortable, but you're not quite as in touch with the wood as you would be without one.

Without gloves you feel badass because you don't care about safety, and you might be able to carve out some slightly more intricate things.

Either way the outcome is roughly the same and it really doesn't matter what your personal preference is.

DO NOT use gloves with a table saw, jointer, etc

There are exceptions, but if you want a simple rule: DO NOT use gloves with power tools

It is extremely dangerous. You can take an injury that would've been a nick on the finger and turn it into a lost hand.

the difference in your analogy emerges when someone wants/needs you to carve out something more intricate, and you say "it's not my job to be able to do this without gloves".

I don't subscribe to that thinking and I try to optimize and improve wherever I can, but developers are an idiosyncratic bunch. You can lead them to water or show them how to fish but lots of good developers just like to do things their own way.

I think it's fine if someone says "I don't use that tool". I personally think that they are making their life harder and their software probably worse, but that seems like a valid choice. What I have a difficult time with is someone who says "I use that tool, but I limit my understanding of it to be as little as I can, because understanding my tools is not part of my job". That's what I felt the OP was doing.

You don't need much knowledge of your version-control system in your head to be an effective programmer.

I find the location of a bug by running tests and looking at the code.

`git bisect` is pretty cool, but “knowing your tools” isn't the same thing as “memorising the man pages”.

yes, if the bug is a complex interaction of several different code changes, and comes and goes, then a binary search will not find it. however, it may be the fastest way to realize that it is this sort of bug. recognizing patterns in what happens when you use git bisect is another aspect of knowing your tools, and in this case, will help you move more rapidly toward a more appropriate approach.

But that doesn't mean I need to have memorised the CLI invocations. There's a button in Git GUI for all the things I need to do (including the things you've listed), and in the rare case where I need to do something else (e.g. submodules), I can look it up, just as I do in the rare case where I need to make a symbolic link.

I say "just rebase your branch" and I can see the panic grow in their eyes.

The irony of that is that resolving conflicts in a complicated multi-commit rebase is much more easily/efficiently done in a good GUI than on the command line. Not all GUIs support it though (I think SourceTree gives up if there's a conflict), in fact it's a bit of an acid test for a Git GUI. The Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm, CLion, IDEA, etc.) work very well. (So does TortoiseHg but obviously not for Git!)

[1] https://magit.vc/

I use the terminal commands for everything else though.

This is an argument for a good GUI diff/merge tool, which is not necessarily the same thing as an argument for a GUI Git client; I think the two uses are being conflated a lot throughout this comment thread. I have Kaleidoscope set as my default mergetool and difftool, but I'm still working with the git CLI nearly all the time. (I use Gitup on the occasions I want to stage changes to individual sets of lines in the same file as multiple commits, and exceedingly rarely if I'm trying to do something frightening with a local as-yet-unshared feature branch. There are times being able to undo with Cmd-Z is really helpful.)

I'm talking about a VCS tool telling me that the rebase had got to commit n of m and a conflict has been encountered, and which files have conflicts resolved (either automatically or I've manually resolved then so far in this tool), and which other files have conflicts outstanding. Then I can invoke the three way merge tool from there (which is indeed hugely better than a command line tool). Something like this (except this is for Hg):

https://i.stack.imgur.com/kaFNz.png

But truly, I never just use plain pull, but pull --rebase, and I have not experienced such a conflict in years.

The commit history also stays a bit more linear. (Other developers use normal pull).

But I see no reason to not use Jetbrains beautiful beautiful git integration for almost everything. It really is just ... perfect.

But if people want to feel superior by typing commands in a terminal, go ahead.

I think it’s had a rebase GUI since I first started using it in 2013. It may not have had one back then for interactive rebase, or else it didn’t work for me, but it does now.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/kaFNz.png

This is just me but I’m quite happy viewing the graph via CLI and doing interactive rebases to fix issues.

I have no problems with other people preferring a GUI but all I’ve tried have been confusing for me.

I think these people would be better served by a backup system where you can pin snapshots. They don’t really want to use VCSs like they’re meant to be.

I get the whole “we should have a neat history of feature commits” argument, but that’s really only one facet of a good source control system.

The fact that these goals appear to conflict shows me there’s some sort of lack in git. For all its (many, many) problems, uber-complex source control system ClearCase at least allowed you to specify a view, so you could see both types of information depending on your use-case.

- Make a branch for my work.

- Commit early, often and with often meaningless commit messages like “WIP” or “try x” or “nope x doesn’t work, do y instead” - in other words, what the work was.

- Push this branch to a remote (either personal or shared depending on policy) largely to synchronise between machines, but also as a backup.

- When ready to integrate, interactively rebase into a set of cohesive units which are independently buildable and have detailed commit messages which explain why the work was done, not what the works was.

- Push _this_ as a pull request, Gerrit change set, or email patch, depending on policy.

This approach gives you the best of both worlds: fast, easy backup and easy unwind when doing work, and a clean history for the benefit of future developers on the project.

I’m fact I’ve found that far more useful than a well curated history.

Having both would be a good thing. Having both in a not-ridiculously overcomplex system even better… I wonder if there even is a sweet spot.

You can always keep your working branches on a personal remote, or interesting sets of changes in gists, however.

This kinda defeats the point again, to my view. I’m not familiar enough with gists to know if they would solve this.

git lg --all is probably my most used command in terminals and I think it gives me a better view of how projects are flowing on the whole.

network = log --graph --abbrev-commit --decorate --format=format:'%C(bold blue)%h%C(reset) - %C(bold cyan)%aD%C(reset) %C(bold green)(%ar)%C(reset)%C(bold yellow)%d%C(reset)%n'' %C(white)%s%C(reset) %C(dim white)- %an%C(reset)' --all

Let's all go back to the ed line editor

Most of the time this doesn't matter in practice but you should be aware that unreachable refs don't stay around forever.

Going from SourceTree back to the command line would be a huge step backwards for me. I still use the command line sometimes because there's advanced stuff SourceTree can't do. But for most of my basic everyday operations, the command line is just inviting me to make little accidental mistakes every so often because the state of the repository and branches isn't obvious at a glance.

I only see upside to using an IDE, zero downside. (I've never had SourceTree "corrupt" my repository, and all its commands do exactly what I expect -- it's just running the git commands I'd be typing out anyways.)

I do use the command line for everything else, though. Well except interactive rebasing, I suppose. I pop back in to vscode for that. But even that gets started in the terminal.

But then again, there is always git add -p

    alias gap="git add -p"

Bonus commands: -p/--patch also works for git stash (allowing you to stash only certain changes) and for git checkout (allowing you to discard only certain changes). Since I'm an Old School Git user I actually don't really know the restore/switch commands, but apparently git restore supports -p/--patch as well.

Another neat git add flag is -u/--update: The manpage is a little confusing on this flag, but essentially it makes git add ignore untracked files (it will only stage files that are already part of the repository). If you're like me, you have tons of files laying around in the project folder (e.g. benchmark results or local test input files) that you don't want to commit and yet don't want to add to the .gitignore file (since the files are really just temporary files, other users have no use for the gitignore entries). By using git add -u, you prevent adding them by mistake in a command like git add src/ and realizing a few weeks later that you accidentally added 10 MB of cat pictures to a bugfix commit. If you can identify with this story then git add -u is made for you.

Another bonus fact: If the temporary testing files mentioned in the last paragraph ever reach the status of permanent testing files, and they're still only useful to you personally (so adding them to gitignore doesn't make sense), Git has a little-known feature: You can add local ignore patterns (same syntax as gitignore) to .git/info/exclude (go ahead and check, this file most likely already exists in your Git repository). These patterns are not be part of the repository itself (you don't commit them), rather they act as local configuration. The idea is that you put exclude patterns that are valid for every user of the project (e.g. target/ for a Rust project) in .gitignore, and local exclude patterns for your IDE/editor configuration (.vscode/, .idea/ and friends) and similar files in .git/info/exclude.

In conclusion, I only every run a) git add -u $file (when I want to add all changes made to an existing file), b) git add -p $file (when I want to add only certain changes made to an existing file), or c) git add $new_file (when I consciously want to add a previously untracked file).

These three commands are all you need if you're in the camp of Git users that at least try to make every commit a good package (single, reasonably-scoped and atomic change). If you're in the git commit -a/"squash all intermediate commits into one single monstrous commit" camp then.. have fun with your cat pictures, I guess.

I hope that was at least a little bit helpful to someone.

May I ask why you drop into VS Code for interactive rebasing? Is it about resolving the merge conflicts, or editing the rebase command list? I'm just going to drop two more nice Git features here, but I'll stop myself now before I write too much: git commit --fixup= together with git rebase --autosquash, and git rerere (not a typo).

That seems arrogant. I imagine more thought & care went into git than you can fathom.

if "the issue at hand" is the more typical modern work environment for devleopers, then no, I don't think he has much special insight. Indeed, the fact that he's wrangling something so large and important means he's unlikely to have the time and attention to devote a lot of thought to how best to serve a pretty different group of people.

An obvious consequence of this is git's terrible interface. Its premise is "if you totally understand what Git is up to under the hood, the interface is great!" Fine for a small in-group of kernel developers whose lives are distributed patch sets, but terrible for the average developer. It has taken 15 years to get some reasonably named commands for common things like "restore a file". That's a great sign that we shouldn't listen to Torvalds on topics outside the realm of his admittedly impressive expertise.

Linux is, very intentionally, a piece of software which does not have "easy to understand for non-experts" in its design goals. You generally interface through Linux with system call wrappers provided by a libc (or another specialist library for other interfaces like libfuse or libnetfilter or whatever), not directly. Linus is, quite obviously, good at many things; it's silly to assume that means he's an expert at everything.

Linus developed Git as a low-level tool. Linus put a lot of thought and care into getting the implementation details right, but intentionally did not build an easy-to-use interface. The Git command line that people use today ultimately derives from Cogito, a toolkit written by someone not Linus that sat on top of Git. Eventually Git (which Linus had long since handed off to someone else) adopted most of the conventions of Cogito and created a "porcelain"/"plumbing" split. If you think it was arrogant to develop Cogito, I suspect you disagree with Linus.

Finally, Linus develops Linux with a very particular model, with e-mail-based patch reviews, merges from subsystem maintainers, etc. Most projects (even most open-source projects, but certainly almost all proprietary projects) do not work this way. The Linux kernel does not use a GitHub-style workflow for development, which is by far the most common way people outside the kernel community use Git. It may well be the case that a lot of thought was put into making Git work really well for Linus's use case but it does not match how other people do development.

It has no impact on the underlying concepts that make git scale well, cover 100% and 100% remote cases equally well, and provide deep under-the-hood concepts that can be deployed in exceptional circumstances.

The conversation is about the user experience of using Git - its CLI design, etc. It is entirely about "merely" what commands are being used. TFA is about new Git commands, not about any changed internals. Or, in the case of Sourcetree, it's about not using any of "Linus's" interface to Git (which, again, wasn't written by Linus) but interacting with the same Git internals.

If you have never done this before, and have only ever used git via the ST interface, switching to the CLI to get this done is going to be quite a shock. Maybe that's OK because realistically such tasks should be rare. But sometimes they are a critical task in development, and finding that the entire dev team is completely intimidated by it can be an issue.

It's much better than Subversion that was the standard before git arrived.

And it's much better than Mercurial that was competing to become the source control system to replace SVN.

Pull Requests were never going to happen with Mercurial and it's also not possible to delete a branch without some black magic server-side.

And with Git hopefully it will be possible to move to Trunk-based development, although that requires a lot more than just switching to Git.

Trunk-based development is where you use a single branch for development, instead of multiple branches that you have to merge between.

More info at:

https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

TBF, AIUI they're not, strictly speaking, happening with git either: They're an external addition, invented by GitHub or some such, and not actually part of git itself.

At that point I say to these people, why you even bother with git? Just use what I call ".zip versioning", that is archive the source code an call it "project-vX.Y.Z.zip" and put it on the company fileserver.

Or better learn how to use git, and that means learning the command line and throwing out every gui (well, not all of them, for example I do commit and push/pull with VSCode, but when I have to do serious stuff like merging stuff I do it with the command line). To my experience GUI always cause problems than corrupt the history of the repository.

This is true on so many other levels too. My job isn't to be an AWS expert, VIM master, Visual Studio ninja, Unix professor, et. al.

My job is to make the customer happy. That is it. If the customer is happy, my project managers are happy, the executives are happy, the investors are happy. When all of your bosses are happy, you can get away with absolute murder. No one gives you shit about anything. Production went down because you fucked up? No big deal - that was like the first time in 18 months we had any problems, and the customer can't even see these things through all the magical features get to play with day-to-day. Need to take the entire afternoon to play overwatch because [arbitrary fuck you reason abc]? No one cares as long as you didn't have a scheduled meeting. In this realm, your mind is free to explore side projects without fear of reproach or guilt-trip. Tasks are executed with confidence and calm. Innovations are more frequent and valuable. People are actually relaxing in their time off and enjoy working for their employer.

When the customer is pissed off, it is like entering into Doom Eternal as a non-player character. At every turn you begin to anticipate a heated conversation about missed target XYZ and incident ABC. Each ding of your outlook bumps your blood pressure by 20-30% before you even see the subject line. Your executives start taking damage from your customer's executives. Investors begin executing difficult queries regarding long-term viability. NO one is sleeping anymore. Side projects? Are you fucking kidding me? Not in this hell.

So, when someone in my organization starts giving me the run-around about [pedantic greybeard doctrine which adds 10x overhead to a process], and also has no business value to show for said run-around, I begin to shut things down pretty quickly. If you want to play nuclear release authorization simulator every time you need to check in source code, please do this on your own time. Even the most elite hacker rockstars like to use GUI tools so they can see what the fuck is going on without making their eyes bleed every 10-15 minutes due to terminal character display restrictions.

> The guy who knows every command of git backwards is welcome to apply for a job managing a git repo or something if such a thing exists?

Yes, this is the job of a maintainer in fact. They exist in a variety of organisations but maybe not enough. The best example is the linux kernel. Developers are expected to maintain their own local tree. When it comes to contributing code to the kernel, the patches are sent in a standardised manner to a mailing list and a maintainer then handles dealing with branches, rebases and merges. This means that developers don't need to know any more git than they really want to learn, aside from how to use git-format-patch and git-send-email which are really quite simple tools with an incredibly vast number of tutorials out there explaining them.

This means that people who insist that it's "not their job" to learn git can achieve the requirements of "patches which build at every step and contain isolated step by step changes" using a GUI or doing something really stupid like copying the code aside, deleting and re-cloning the repository and then pasting and committing each step. It also means that people who actually know how to use git can get the job done in a fraction of the time.

It also means that a carpenter^Wdeveloper's insistence to not learn how to use a claw hammer^W^W^Wgit will not affect their fellow coworkers/cocontributors.

Part of the job is to know and understand the tools that you need to use to in order perform the duties as part of that job. Saying that it isn't your job to use git is like a surgeon saying it's not their job to learn how to tie sutures when closing up the surgical site after completing the operation.

I look at the tree visually so frequently it must be my most common command. In the CLI.

    log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit

GUIs work too of course. Just pointing out you don't have to abandon the CLI for a tree. There's fancier third-party tools than native git log that are still CLI even.

I don't understand people that wants to use git but they want do to so with a GUI that abstract everything that git was created to address, and they limit themself to write some code, commit and push. You are not gaining any benefit in using git this way, you are only wasting time to me.

If you choose to adopt git, you learn how to use it, and so you learn the commands (it's not that much effort). In my experience GUI always created problems, especially if someone in a team uses a GUI that creates junk in the repository (like 100 useless merge commits created automatically for things that shouldn't really have been a merge that make git log unreadable...).

Also people that uses GUI typically when they have a problem that the GUI doesn't know how to solve (because they typically implement the basic things and if something goes wrong they can't help you) just deletes the whole repo and clones it again, or worse they try to fix it by pressing random buttons in the GUI and put the repo in a shitty state so another coworker that knows how to use git has to waste his time cleaning up the crap that the fantastic git GUI made.

And I'm not saying that you shouldn't 100% use GUIs. I use the one of VSCode for doing simple things like creating commits, switching branches, and stuff like that. For advanced features like merge, cherry pick, rebase, whatever I use the CLI, I find it more practical.

Nothing to learn or even forget, either, as the CLI is actually the easier part of the job.

So, you do you, nothing wrong with that, but the CLI is here to stay.

Git commit

Git checkout

Git merge

Git pull

Git push

Git rebase

Git stash

I can’t remember I needed a command that wasn’t one of those and I exclusively use the cli.

And that last new thing was when git added worktree, which I don't actually use, but I learned about.

Contrast that with almost any other program....it's impressive.

It's like a plumber complaining that his job isn't driving with a car and that he wants customers to pick him up or wait for him until he comes on foot or via public transport.

Personally, I really enjoy using both the command line and the Github app. The Github app is super simple and straight forward, its great for just committing (parts of) files. Anything more than that and I prefer using the command line for "direct control".

While they had experience with their IDE of choice and git, they were ultimately unable to push any changes.

My job as a dentist isn't to use dental drill, it's to fix teeth in general. If I managed to fix a tooth and customer is happy, it doesn't matter whether I use drill myself or janitor does. Imagine having 100 complex things bouncing around your head and having to make that 101 when you forget the order of drill bits you need for a root canal.

The guy who knows dental drilling backwards is welcome to apply for a job managing dental drills or something if such a thing exists? But I could harp on the same way about his missing medical or braces-training skills.

We thrive on abstractions, but unfortunately in case with versioning and git in particularly, GUI apps is a wrong one.

The janitor knows nothing about dentistry. The git GUI knows plenty about it and the devs make it their job to know it too. A janitor is not an abstraction, he's a liability. If a GUI abstraction helps me get the job done faster, I really don't see the problem. Plus almost every one of them fully state the commands being used to perform every action and have logs you can parse. I used to use Sublime Merge and now use Fork and both have this

janitor is an abstraction (you trust a janitor to operate with a professional tool for you) and you are completely right, git GUIs (just like a janitor) are a liability.

So is there any incentive to switch for the people who went through the trauma of burning the old ones in their soul ? (I often heard that knowing how it works internally makes git commands feel natural. I was lied to)

If you know the old ones already and don't make mistakes, it's fine not to use these, really. I consciously got the new commands into my muscle memory in case I'm pair programming or someone less familiar with Git is looking along.

And yeah, knowing how Git works makes it a lot easier to understand, but it doesn't make the commands more natural. (Except perhaps knowing when you can use a commit id instead of a branch name.)

Currently, that's an ubuntu 18.04 machine at work and that doesn't have `git restore`, yet.

distributing improvements after a large mass of old habits are spread around is something to be fixed

Indeed, Linus has only one commit in the last 3 years, and is the #28 committer of all time.

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=comm...

The changes were mostly pretty small as well, which would make sense given he has been hands off for quite some time now.

Git was written to meet the version control requirements of the Linux kernel. It works well for that project's needs which are an outlier for most development needs unless you are working at FAANG scale.

In our case, fully distributed development (no developers live or work within 1000 miles of each other), public repository, welcoming 3rd party PRs, strong use of topic branches, fully rebase-not-merge workflow. 600k lines of C++, 21 year history, on the order of 100 contributors, 2-3 core developers at any point in time.

C++ is by no means simple.

(Myself, I've been heard complaining that git is overly complex, but the source code control systems that I used to use before git include Subversion, CVS and various Rational products and I have no desire to go back to any of them.)

I catch up on a forum a few times a year, asking myself if it's ready for me to switch a repo or two over and see how it goes. So far I have to answer no, but I'm hoping it's just a matter of time.

https://pijul.org/posts/2021-06-28-two-changes/

Like a new filesystem, you should have a backup system in place if you use this, but the system is being well tested.

1. git init: to start a new repository

2. git status: checks your current state

3. git add -A: To begin tracking files

4. git commit -am: Commit all changes in the working directory with a message added on

5. git switch -c [branch name]: Create a branch and switch to it. (git checkout -b will do the same thing)

6. git switch [branch name]: switch between named branches

7. git merge[branch]: merge named branch into current branch

8. git branch [branch name] -D : delete branch if not tracked

9. git log --pretty=oneline: show a graph of commit history.

11. git push

12. git clone [repo]: Copy of a project/file onto your local computer.

The comments also contain some additional advice. Here is a good introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sjqTHE0zok

I will admit that I'm a lazy git user, and do most of my commits with `git commit -a`, rather than `-am` since I do try and give a short paragraph explaining the reasoning behind whatever the title message claims is the purpose of the commit.

I do run `git diff` first to see what I've changed, and if the diff has unrelated changes in different files I'll usually break it up into separate commits.

Decent introductory list, though. It won't surprise you that I think diff should be learned immediately; whether or not you need rebase depends on the conventions of the codebase, and if someone can learn it later they should, it can get tricky.

Dangerous advice there. Use the lower-case '-d' option. It'll tell you that you maybe don't want to delete the branch when it has unmerged commits.

If you really want to delete the branch then, the output of `git branch -d` tells you this option.

If you are chucking all your commits onto master - power to you. That's probably a good pattern (I prefer as much historical data as possible to a 'neat' commit history), but I never see it done because usually master is linked to CI and the idea is is every commit to master should be a valid build.

Squashing everything is bad because it makes code review and backports harder. Maybe you don't care about backports, but if you care about code reviews...

Honestly I just diff the whole thing from where they branched to the tip anyway I rarely find the individual commits useful as there is usually a process of their discovery in that with backtracks etc. that’s a waste of time to review.

For example I could review a new class that they heavily refactored in the next commit.

I’ve not had an issue with code reviews or backporting. I suspect this is because either out units of work are smaller than usual (no long feature branches)

But maybe you are onto something here and I’m missing out on a better way but I’ve not experienced enough pain in squashing on merge to master to contemplate switching to a rebase workflow (which means convincing team members too)

If you want to learn Git from the inside out, I wrote a two-parter that aims to explain Git from the inside out, focusing on the data-structure Git uses:

https://looselytyped.com/blog/2014/08/31/gits-guts-part-i/

https://looselytyped.com/blog/2014/08/31/gits-guts-part-i/

Finally, _if_ you have an O'Reilly subscription, I am currently writing Head First Git (first four chapters are in early release). If you are not familiar with the Head First series, its a rather unique format that involves using lot of pictures to explain ideas and traditionally the books move a lot slower than most technical books. Ideas/concepts are cemented using puzzles, quizzes, crosswords.

You can see a list of the existing ones here https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Series-Books/b?ie=UTF8&nod...

Feel free to email me if you need any more resources—I have spent a lot of time teaching Git.

https://learngitbranching.js.org/

You lean in 30 minutes more than you learn in hours of reading documentation and experimenting

Whenever I do git status, it tells me which files are changed and if I want to go back to their previous states, I can use got restore.

After a few month the autocomplete got updated as well and I could actually use the new interface without to much frustration.

It's great to see that someone took time to restore sanity. I'll switch to these commands now.

Thats’s why checkout is such a great name.

Maybe ‘apply’ would be good.

My git-fu is often lacking, but I don’t blame git for being hard, I blame myself for not taking the time to be amazing at a tool basically everyone uses all day every day.

It’s silly not to know git. It might be the most used development tool in the world.

Serious question - Why is it that they're called new two years later? Is it that no one cares to read git's prompts or release notes?

I think your doing yourself a disservice by even thinking in terms of "checking out a file" as separate from checking out a branch. The units git deals in are commits and branches, not really individual files as such. If you want to use it, better get used to thinking in the same units it does.

git switch -

For going back to the previous branch you checked out.

    git checkout -

However, what really sticks in my memory are the concepts Git implemented. This helps to refresh the operational knowledge rather quickly, well, notes help too.

In my view, 'check-out' as a concept is very much central to VCS as such. So, having a dedicated 'checkout' command which works on both commits/branches and files is quite reasonable - it keeps you in the same conceptual context.

I don't mind the specialized commands, such as 'switch' and 'restore'. But sure enough, I'll forget these wordings or maybe even mix them up with 'reset' or 'revert', ??'undo', yet the 'checkout' command would likely present itself on my command line as it's directly tied to the concept.

I feel like these things should be versioned in some fashion. Perhaps come up with a clean slate api and enable it via calling git2 or git3 instead of this terrible mish-mash where new commands are constrained by previous bad decisions.

Of course this is not a novel idea, and people attempt this by making their own veneer with a different name… but this has to come from the top for it to be effective. People won’t en masse bother with git2 or git3 if it is not built into the mainline distribution.

I guess I should give it a try a submit a patch.

For example, ‘git status’ becomes ‘gs’ and it also gives you a numbered list of files. You can then substitute these numbers in place of file names in subsequent commands. No more manually typing names / paths.

Other examples are:

* ‘git add <file name>’ -> ‘ga <number>’

* ‘git add -A’ -> ‘gaa’

* ‘git checkout’ -> ‘gco’

[1]: https://github.com/scmbreeze/scm_breeze

Obviously Git and Subversion are different beasts but, if you only needed the functionality provided by Subversion, I always found the Subversion commands better named and easier to use. I'm glad that Git is slowly re-inventing these commands that Subversion had from the beginning.

It also never occurred to me that the checkout command was overloaded in that particular way.

And I think arguably modifying working-directory files vs. modifying .git/HEAD are distinct things (though at this point I also find using checkout for everything to be pretty intuitive).

The way you use git is by first understanding its model. If you understand the git model, everything makes sense.

If you come to it expecting it to be a tool that magically does what you want, I guess you will be very disappointed.

Consistency may be superficial to you, but that's a personal preference that not everyone shares.

> The way you use git is by first understanding its model. If you understand the git model, everything makes sense

Doesn't follow. I think I've got at least an acceptable handle on git's model, but I can't see how that should mean I'd have to accept that wildly inconsistent command switches "make sense". Care to explain how one leads to the other?

In the checkout model, branches are just named aliases for their current hash. This seems trivial to me. Do we really need to use another vocabulary spot up in our heads for a command that is strictly a more-restricted checkout?

Ever drive a car that had every function ever on one stalk? The one that's the turn signal also has the cruise control, radio, lights, wipers, and blinker fluid. Much of git is like that – context-sensitive.

I can't really fault the programmers, they (he) had a certain mental model and translated that concretely to commands. Except that the internal abstractions of how get works are orthogonal to tasks and use cases of users.

I’d love to see a source on that. Can experimental features not go away without notice at any moment?

To adapt the adage about democracy: git is the worst VCS, except for all the other ones.

[1] The experimental status is not because it's unstable but rather to allow us (or now, them) to change the UI design based on feedback if we got it wrong (again!).

so maybe wait until that note is removed.

Situation: Git has 137 difficult and unintuitive subcommands [2], and new users can't keep straight which ones they should use.

"Oh man, that's awful, let's add new subcommands that are clear, and do just one thing well!"

Soon: Situation: Git's CLI has 138 difficult and unintuitive subcommands.

[1] <https://xkcd.com/927/>

[2] Yup, seriously, as of 2.32. I checked.

Git user since 2012 here.

(Only since 2014 myself.)

I believe git-checkout could silently overwrite data in one case (can't remembe the details). And git-swith will stop you from moving the branch when you're in a middle of a rebase or other multi-command operations. It also tries to avoid entering detached HEAD mode by default.

It's definitely geared towards newcomers. But even I'm glad it catches me from doing stupid things from time to time.

- the commit you want to checkout, which defaults to HEAD

- the files you want to checkout, which defaults to everything

Simple as.

I've been using the alias `gk='git checktout'` for years now.

Git has been my first terminal-oriented versioning control system. I've used TFS and other but never focused on the action name, just the icons.

Checkout branch/hash/file seems more potent than two different commands.

  git checkout -b new_branch

  git switch -c new_branch

IMO the UI of git switch is much more intuitive, since the argument is always a branch and the default behavior is to switch to an existing branch. For slightly different behavior (like creating the branch first) there are flags.

So I think it's good that the flag for switch is a different one than for checkout, since the interface of git checkout was quite unintuitive IMO.

With `checkout`, however, what does `-b` even mean? Branch?

That said, it'll sure take time before the majority of developers (including myself) get onboard with it.

Would a deprecation flag be a good idea for git?

KDE, git, and FreePascal / Lazarus.