What git is not

Re:What git is not by nuclear_eclipse on Friday February 20, 2009 @03:15PM (#489167)

Between `git help -a` to see all the available commands, and `git help <command>` or `man git-<command>`, I don't see how Git is any worse than any other VCS tool. Git is extremely well-documented, and even goes so far as to provide ASCII-diagrams in the docs to help you visualize what certain commands do.

Or are you just being picky because Git doesn't name everything exactly the same as other tools do?

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Re:What git is not by davidw on Friday February 20, 2009 @03:28PM (#489188)

I started with cvs, years ago, moved on to subversion when it was good and stable, and am now starting to fiddle with git. I like it a lot, but it is "fiddly" feeling. I'm sorry I can't describe it better than that, but it's just a feeling I get from it. Maybe this covers it: I don't get the feeling that it's going to much effort to "make the easy things simple and the hard things possible". We know it can do the latter, but the former is not always true.

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Re:What git is not by jrockway on Friday February 20, 2009 @06:53PM (#489435)

"make the easy things simple and the hard things possible"

Well, it's Git, not Perl :)

I like it a lot, but it is "fiddly" feeling.

To assuage this feeling, I recommend reading the source code for both Git and Subversion. After you realize the flaky shoestring-and-chewing-gum model that holds all your data in subversion, you won't worry at all about Git's UI :)

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Re:What git is not by allenbrunson on Friday February 20, 2009 @09:34PM (#489587)

i agree with this. i'm very happy with svn. my one foray into git was when i was working on somebody else's project on github, and i got a vague uneasy feeling about it. for one thing, the output it prints to the terminal seems needlessly complex and verbose.

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Re:What git is not by 100k on Friday February 20, 2009 @03:26PM (#489184)

I think it would be better if git had decided to model its commands on Subversion, yes.

However, I am mostly complaining because certain very common operations are way more complicated than they need to be.

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Re:What git is not by nuclear_eclipse on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:05PM (#489233)

What are your specific complaints, and are they anything more than the age-old "`git commit` doesn't commit everything by default"? I'm not trying to snark; I'm genuinely interested in what people find difficult about Git, that much more it's possible to "fix".

If there's something complex that you think should be easy, you always have two basic options: - create an alias in your ~/.gitconfig linking a short command name to a long command/argument sequence - create a shell script in /usr/libexec/git-core (or the equivalent) that does what you want, and you can instantly use that in the standard `git <command>` method.

For an example, I have aliased 'co' to 'checkout', 'ci' to 'commit -a', 'pullr' to 'pull --rebase', and 'fp' to 'format-patch --binary'.

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