Heey, that's actually pretty good! I don't think it's "godawful". In the second sentence it recommends starting with gittutorial and giteveryday, for a "useful minimum set of commands".
I must admit, I still occasionally (regularly?) search for "magic incantations", particular combinations of flags for sed, git, rsync, etc. But the man pages are my first go-to, and they usually do the job as a proper documentation system. It's better than most software I've worked with outside (or on top) of the OS, with their ad-hoc, incomplete or outdated docs.
The issue with git is that no matter how well documented, the user interface is horribly designed. For starters, how many different things does "git checkout" do, and how many of them actually reflect an intuitive meaning of "checking out" ?
I see this type of remark against git quite often on HN and I think it's exaggerated.
I agree some of the porcelain are misleading and overloaded as convenience functions such as checkout, however a decent chunk of it is inline with the underlying data structure. Nothing is perfect, and git is pretty damn good - horribly designed? no, could do with some breaking porcelain re-writes? sure.
The git UI is absolutely horribly designed, as demonstrated by the mercurial or darcs UIs which, while completely different, were significantly easier to discover, intuit and remember.
The concept of the git staging area is utterly superfluous. All local changes that are propagated to the version control system should go directly into a durable commit object, and not to a pseudo-commit object that isn't a commit, and that can be casually trashed.
That commit object could be pointed at by a separate COMMIT_HEAD pointer. If you have a COMMIT_HEAD different from HEAD, then you have a commit brewing. Finalizing the commit means moving HEAD to be the same as COMMIT_HEAD. (At that time, there is a prompt for the log message, if one hasn't been already prepared.)
Your "staged" changes are then "git diff HEAD..COMMIT_HEAD", and not "git diff --cached".
Speaking of which, why the hell is "cached" a synonym for "in the index"? Oh, because the index holds a full snapshot of everything. But that proliferation of terminology just adds to the confusion.
I can't think of any other area of computing in which "cache" and "index" are mixed up.
I like the staging area, though–at any given time I always have code that I do not want to put in a commit object (perhaps I changed some build flags, or my IDE touched some files I don't care for, or…) However, I do agree 100% that all the terminology is pretty bad.
The sin of Git's staging area is that Git forces it into the default interaction path—requiring you to take it into consideration whether or not you're interested in only committing some of the changes. Git should default to including all changes, and iff you direct it to (i.e. by explicitly specifying `git add`) should you have to take into consideration the notion that some changes are staged and others aren't.
I'm generally also one of the git sceptics - Though I loved staging for a while as for the fine grained control. `git add --all` just might not do the right thing - for paranoids like me. Just recently got to know you can skip the staging by appending the paths of the changed files you want to commit after `git commit -m "awesome commit"` - neat.
Only the workspace can be built and tested, so the workspace is what should be committed. We should be stashing anything we don't want to test and commit yet.
The stash is another feature that should use the regular commit representation. Well, somehow. Yes, the stash is different in that it preserves (or can preserve) uncommitted changes, as well as staged changes, and it can tell these apart.
However, if the staging area is relaced by a CHEAD commit ("commit head") whose parent is HEAD, then the problem of "stashing the index" completely goes away. You don't stash staged changes because they are already committed into the staging commit CHEAD.
That said, the stash feature could work with this CHEAD. Stashing the staged changes sitting in CHEAD could propagate them into the stash somehow (such as by a reference to that commmit). Then CHEAD is reset to point to HEAD, and the changes are gone. A single stash item consisting of work tree changes and staged changes could simply be an object that references two commits: a commit of working changes committed just for the stash, and a reference to the CHEAD which existed at that time. It could be that one is the parent of the other. So that is to say, a commit is made of the working copy changes, parented at the CHEAD. The stash then points to the SHA of that commit.
Intuitively, I know this would work, because in the existing Git, I could easily implement this workflow instead of using the stash. Given a tree of local changes, I could "stage" some of them by creating a commit with "git commit --patch". Then "stash" rest of them into another commit "git commit -a". Then, create a branch or tag for that two-commit combo, and finally get rid of it with "git reset --hard HEAD^^". Later, I could easily recover the changes from that branch, either by cherry picking, or doing a hard reset to them or whatever.
Speaking of which, an example of how stashes are limiting because they aren't commits, think of how you can't do:
git reset --hard stash@{0} # wipe it all away and make it like this stash
You can't do that because a "reset --hard anything" cannot reproduce a state where you have outstanding working copy changes and/or an uncommitted index, but "stash apply" or "stash pop" are saddled with that requirement.
The requirement of reproducing working changes and staged ones from a stash represented as a two-commit combo is very simple. You cherry pick one normally and make it the CHEAD (the aforementioned special head for pointing to a commit being staged). Then the other one is cherry-picked with -n, so it is applied as local changes.
“git stash push --patch” lets you choose hunks to copy into the new stash and clean out of the workspace. It’s pretty similar to “git add --patch” for choosing hunks to stage.
Git has weird terminology. Though a lot of commercial SCMs are also a bit strange. Example: Perforce which has depots and shelves. At least with git, I can create a branch without waiting 2 weeks for the IT department.
It “sort of” makes sense. When a company shelves a movie, they’re probably never finishing it. When I shelve my code, I’m probably coming back to it at some point soon. For example, I worked at a place that would have everyone “shelve” all their code before code review. In that context it didn’t make sense to me.
Single data point, but I used hg for three years at work and never warmed up to it the way I've warmed up to git (and that's the "porcelain" too, I've never done a deep dive into the plumbing).
In recent versions of git (since 2.23) the two main `git checkout` functions have been split into two newly supported dedicated commands: `git switch` and `git restore`.
Of course the next step is unlearning `git checkout` muscle memory and moving to using `git switch` and `git restore` more regularly.
It's the command that does "Reset working directory/Discard changes/Revert to last commit"! You'd think that's what "git reset" would to, but of course not.
> You'd think that's what "git reset" would to, but of course not.
Ahem, the command for "Reset working directory/Discard changes/Revert to last commit" is "git reset --hard".
That's the one I use.
"git checkout -f" does the same thing, but only because their different functionality coincides when there are no other arguments. When given a non-HEAD commit-id or branch-id they do different things.
Some time ago, some UI designer asked, on HN, for what open source program should they build a UI to establish their reputation. I suggested "git". That was rejected as too hard. They just wanted to put eye candy on a command, not have to rethink its relationship with the user.
A few years back, a designer waded into the middle of the echochamber on some HN thread about inculcating people from other disciplines. They wrote that "as a designer" they did not consider Git (GitHub?) to be thoughtfully put together or well-suited for the kind of work they do or something like that. It was a short comment, about as long as that, and there was no flaw or faux pas or even anything incendiary about it. HN wasn't having it, though, and downvoted it mercilessly. (There were no responses to say why it had been downvoted; the subthread dead-ended there.) It's things like this that remind me of the now-infamous comment in the Dropbox thread.
I didn't think at the time to bookmark it with my "hn sucks" tag, and over the past year or two, I've tried several times to find it again, for reasons similar to[1], but I've been unable to.
The fundamental assumption is that people will either ask how to do something, or read the documentation/manual. It's not that we'll try to figure out how something work by experimenting.
When I first started using UNIX/Linux after learning the DOS shell, I never said that using commands like rm or mkdir were not intuitive and that it should be like using del or md instead. I just learned the different commands by reading through documentation.
And what if you don't have anyone to ask? The article very clearly states why the documentation is useless for a beginner.
Other OSes have a concept called forgiveness that allows you to easily reverse a change you made explicitly so that you can experiment with it and figure things out for yourself. The problem is that Unix fundamentally doesn't allow you to figure things out by yourself. You absolutely need either a manual (that you will never find if you haven't already been told how to find it), or you need to have someone you can ask questions to.
Is it true to think that because they made some choices early on that those choices forever blemish its value even is said choices are later addressed?
Much of the complaints about checkout have been split to other commands in newer versions. Does this make Git still invalid in your opinion?
The one thing that all the negative commentary fails to acknowledge is that even in the face of this somewhat overstated inconsistency across all these command line tools and applications, is that for the knowledgeable and motivated, it is quite simple to wrap the more complex invocations in simplified scripts or, at the other extreme, a completely functional native GUI.
They also fail to acknowledge that contemporary unix, aka Linux in it's many derivations and flavors, is entirely malleable at the source code level by it's users. That is a feature provided by literally no other operating system that is deployable at scale, and is, in fact, the singular feature that drives it's adoption -- not only is it 'free', you can hack it together in any fashion you damn well please, and you can use it to build peer-grade native applications, typically with little more than a tip of the hat as 'overhead'.
tl;DR:
Some folks might miss the point because they are not sufficiently motivated to engage the *nix world with the degree of articulation required to tap into it's less than casually accessible capabilities.
Sigh. Why are there still lots, heaps, and tons of horrible, inhumane, broken legacy technology still around in active use? Because its users/proponents are "knowledgeable and motivated" enough to keep pushing through. Sort of a Stockholm syndrome of computing, really.
My brain is really quite small compared to all the knowledge about computers that is out there. And my willpower too is very limited. So I would rather learn things I'd rather like to know, and be motivated to do things I'd rather get done instead of spending those precious resources of mine (and time! I will die in less than 25,000 days, that's a pretty small amount of time, you know) on something of dubious value.
It's one thing to learn something like physics for dumb engineers. Or Thermodynamics. Mechanical dynamics. Differential equations. Where it's hard to get your brain wrapped around. But there light at the end of the tunnel.
Vs obtuse half broken shit people created out of whole cloth and refuse to fix.
They are still around because, through historical accident, they are what everyone knows and uses.
Making a special snowflake that fits your brain better is good for you, but not necessarily anyone else.
Making something good for everyone will, almost inevitably, become a design-by-committee monstrosity that is as problematic as the tool being replaced.
The truth is, I am skeptical that these tools can be replaced by something that requires no effort to learn. At least, for the tools we already have, if you dont want to learn them, you can roll the dice and copy / paste from google overflow.
> Making a special snowflake that fits your brain better is good for you, but not necessarily anyone else.
Yes, and that's why the parent's argument that "you can hack it together in any fashion you damn well please, and you can use it to build peer-grade native applications, typically with little more than a tip of the hat as 'overhead'" is not a convincing argument. Yes, you can learn a lot about it and tinker with it and "harness its power", as opposed to using something that's less flexible, but is already pretty damn ergonomical, and is much more accessible and easy to learn about (maybe to the point you're not even realizing you're learning).
You got me there. I should have said, man pages are my go-to for POSIX commands.
For Git, I usually turn to online documentation (at https://git-scm.com/docs) or, more often than not, search for keywords and, yes, end up at StackOverflow.
That supports the root-parent comment's point, that there are "fundamental design issues of POSIX", if users new and experienced must resort to such channels. It also implies that "man" as the default documentation system is not sufficiently meeting our needs.
I ran "man git" for the first time ever.
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/git.1.html
Heey, that's actually pretty good! I don't think it's "godawful". In the second sentence it recommends starting with gittutorial and giteveryday, for a "useful minimum set of commands".
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/gittutorial.7.html
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/giteveryday.7.html
I must admit, I still occasionally (regularly?) search for "magic incantations", particular combinations of flags for sed, git, rsync, etc. But the man pages are my first go-to, and they usually do the job as a proper documentation system. It's better than most software I've worked with outside (or on top) of the OS, with their ad-hoc, incomplete or outdated docs.