Beej's Guide to Git

Re:Beej's Guide to Git by globular-toast on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @06:10AM (#42946888)

There is one fundamental piece missing in your description of git that I think is the main reason people don't understand it. You have described a single DAG, but in git there are multiple DAGs. This is what it means to be a distributed version control system.

In my experience people come to git and start using it with the centralised paradigm in their heads: that there is one repo and one DAG etc. They think that their master branch is the same as "the" master branch. You just can't get good at git with this wrong understanding.

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Re:Beej's Guide to Git by HdS84 on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @04:01PM (#42955057)

My problem is that I always use git as a central server. Except that one time when our internal git was down and we used it peer to peer for a day. Honestly, using USB sticks for that would also have been okay.

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Re:Beej's Guide to Git by globular-toast on Thursday February 06, 2025 @09:00AM (#42962353)

> Honestly, using USB sticks for that would also have been okay.

Right! People often forget git was designed specifically for Linux kernel development which is done by a loosely-knit global base of developers. There are much simpler solutions if you can actually live with exchanging USB sticks.

One nice thing is only needing to know one tool for both open source and centralised development, though. It can seem a little odd if you don't do any open source at all, though.

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