Why Git is hard
Why Git is hard
Git is a hack that was created by a bunch of kernel hackers with a UI that wasn't originally meant to be the final user-facing UI. If you have done what the kernel devs do, you would understand git. That includes:
- Taking snapshots of the source tree (perhaps as a zip or tar), along with a file that indicates what snapshot was for, you understand trees.
- Applying patch queues (with something like quilt), you understand commits, rebasing and cherrypicks.
- Reversing a patch - you get reverts.
- Modifying a patch - you get commit amends.
- Do a 3 way merge - that's a git merge.
There were a whole bunch of ad-hoc kernel dev operations that got consolidated in git. Honestly, a similar tool should rethink the design to be more intuitive, orthogonal and have fewer concepts that cover all use-cases. (No. xkcd doesn't apply here. Git does everything. It just needs a better design).
I've only ever seen two parts of git that could arguably be called unintuitive, and they both got fixes:
git resetseems to do 2 unrelated things for some people. Nowadaysgit restoreexists.- the inconsistent difference between
a..banda...bcommit ranges in various commands. This is admittedly obscure enough that I would have to look up the manual half the time anyway. - I suppose we could call the fact that
man git foodidn't used to work unintuitive I guess.
The tooling to integrate
git submoduleinto normal tree operations could be improved though. But nowadays there'sgit subtreefor all the people who want to do it wrong but easily.
The only reason people complain so much about git is that it's the only VCS that's actually widely used anymore. All the others have worse problems, but there's nobody left to complain about them.
Honestly, a similar tool should rethink the design to be more intuitive, orthogonal and have fewer concepts that cover all use-cases.
With regards to Git I'm a victim of Stockholm syndrome, thus it's hard for me to see where are all those alleged unintuitive design choices.
This analysis is rendered even more difficult as these criticisms of Git are depicted in vague terms without mentioning a single concrete example.
To make matters worse, these accusations become even less credible given the fact that all other Git competitors seem to copy Git's user interface almost verbatim. This means Git must be doing something right.
So given this issue, is there any concrete example of where Git is lacking in the UI department?
I had a really pleasant experience using mercurial. Some of the things git may be missing:
- excellent tui for selecting chunks like in
commit -i. Arrow keys quickly fold and unfold files/chunks/individual lines - commits come in 3 categories:
publiccommits were seen by other people and are considered immutabledraftcommit is your regular WIP local commit and can't be a parent to apubliccommit.secretcommit with your printf debugging won't be uploaded by accident
- when you
rebase, your previous commits are markedobsoleteand hidden from most UI. For an obsolete commit it is easy to find it's updated version. The graph of obsolete revisions is an orthogonal DAG on top of the regular commit DAG.
- excellent tui for selecting chunks like in
I use git almost every hour and I rarely have to deal with git problems (just enough practice to avoid them). I'm also confident about resolving problems if they do arise. Heck, I even configure my entire system and manage my life using text files managed by git. So I don't claim that it's all that bad.
But if you want me to give concrete examples of how problematic git UI can be, you are so far removed from reality and are neglecting the very visible and vocal struggle git beginners have. I'm saying this as someone who trained a lot of people in using git from the very beginner level, all the way up to emailing patches - as part of a community and as a corporate trainer. I can write essays about every single problem that can trip a beginner due to git's inconsistency - but am not going to - because they are acknowledged problems (by git devs) and they actively work on it.