Git is complicated _beacuse_ of this. The defaults are tuned for this. But, most people don't need this. I'm sure there are people out there who set an upstream to their coworkers PC and clone a branch from them, merge it with their work and then someone else takes that and is saved a bunch of work because the commits all line up, but for every 1 of those people there are probably 100,000 who push and pull to a centralized forge, and pay the complexity cost for the distributed workflow.
> but they almost always fail to put forward some simpler alternative that can handle the same things. Is git actually accidentally complicated or purposefully complicated because the topic at hand is kind of complicated?
Git is complicated because it's got poor defaults, an unintuitive cli, and is designed for distributed workflows (I've never worked anywhere that has used a distributed workflow, fwiw). I can sit someone down with perforce for 15 minutes and basically never have to interact with them on it again. It's _so_ much simpler - because it's centralized. It has some baggage, is definitely not perfect (and it costs an absolute bomb). Mercurial is another example of something that is much, much easier to use and work with. I wish mercurial won, honestly.
Right, but since git specifically was made for usage without decentralized servers, that complexity isn't accidental, it's purposeful as without serving that particular use case, git isn't really git anymore. Most design decisions in git comes from having to serve that use case, for better or worse.
> . It's _so_ much simpler - because it's centralized
Right, but that's also a poor comparison. A bit like saying that `mv` is much simpler than `rsync` because `mv` always move files locally. Yeah, that's true, but the entire point of `rsync` is to do remote sends/receives, so compared it to something that cannot, kind of ruins the comparison.
With GitHub being the top platform for sharing source code and as the top choice for the basket of all our eggs, I'd wager we need DVCSs more than people need or appreciate today. And that's just considering how often GitHub is down today.
If we start to emphasize with people who have really shitty internet connections (which is a larger part of the world than you seem to think), we can start to understand why it's really useful to be able to share our code with our co-workers on our local network without having to rely on terrible, minimum 5s latency connections to US companies who basically don't care about you.
Note: centralized does not mean you can’t work in offline mode or share basic deltas
Now svn does have things I miss from the Mercurial world.. grep --all, fa --deleted, revsets, phases.. some could be implemented serverside in svn, but svn dev lost a lot of momentum post-DVCS (git esp).
But DVCS has issues that aren't an issue in svn land. History consistency, simple reliable narrow/shallow, people can work on files independently without syncing. (and a significantly more complex dvcs process)
What I'm curious about though, since I basically entered the software developer workforce just as Git became mainstream and GitHub became popular, how would you do those things with the alternatives at the time; SVN, Mercurial, Perforce and the rest? Would it be easier or harder? Would it work better/worse in a sync/async context, without centralized servers?
There are lots of people complaining about how needlessly complicated git is, but they almost always fail to put forward some simpler alternative that can handle the same things. Is git actually accidentally complicated or purposefully complicated because the topic at hand is kind of complicated?