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The article hits the nail squarely on the head. Git is pretty awesome, I love using github. From what I've seen of Mercurial, it is also mostly blessed the sam

The article hits the nail squarely on the head. Git is pretty awesome, I love using github. From what I've seen of Mercurial, it is also mostly blessed the same awesomeness. Getting people to convert is a fairly big undertaking, though, and although the author touches on this, he might be underestimating the task of conversion a little bit. The first of his 3 points (that git/mercurial's inferior handling of binary files is one of the major issues) is in my opinion dwarfed by an issue he doesn't even mention: git's cryptic user experience and sometimes insanely-scary (especially to git newbies) error messages. I've met plenty of coders who are brilliant programmers but are completely baffled by the very simplest of operations in git when they fail. I'm not sure a better user experience is even remotely on the radar of the folks who work on git, so for git newbies, it's back to svn. Has anyone else noticed this? I'd love to get my day job's project moved from svn to git, given the tremendous benefits (we experience a lot of pain when branching our svn repo), but the pain of moving has to be eased significantly. Moving a repo like ours doesn't just involve importing the repo, it involves training, dealing with all the errors and hangups, figuring out how to make our ancient installation Trac talk to our repo, connecting it to Eclipse and NetBeans, and adjusting all of our build processes. I think if the day to day git experience was less cryptic, we could probably handle the remaining issues.

weaksauce 17y ago
What is wrong with using git-svn on your local machine instead of trying to migrate everything over to git?
- Maciek416 17y ago
  Well, partially my personal ignorance with how that would work :) But also.. my team often has to break into pairs to work on sub-projects and new features, and it would be nice to have everyone on board rather than just a single person. The whole package is compelling. Thanks for the idea though.
  - weaksauce 17y ago
    You're welcome. git-svn is an interface to a svn server that handles the interaction with the svn server. You checkout from the svn server. Do local git stuff and then when you have a completed feature/bugfix you use git-svn to push it back to the svn server. Food for thought at least.
mml 17y ago
yes. the actively hostile UI of git is the only reason i can think of that makes a difference between hg and git. they are functionally identical (though hg is far better documented to boot). i've been screaming this from the mountain tops for years. oh, and -another- aliasing system on top of bash's is just stupid, so don't even mention it.

weaksauce 17y ago

What is wrong with using git-svn on your local machine instead of trying to migrate everything over to git?

Maciek416 17y ago
Well, partially my personal ignorance with how that would work :) But also.. my team often has to break into pairs to work on sub-projects and new features, and it would be nice to have everyone on board rather than just a single person. The whole package is compelling. Thanks for the idea though.
- weaksauce 17y ago
  You're welcome. git-svn is an interface to a svn server that handles the interaction with the svn server. You checkout from the svn server. Do local git stuff and then when you have a completed feature/bugfix you use git-svn to push it back to the svn server. Food for thought at least.

mml 17y ago

yes. the actively hostile UI of git is the only reason i can think of that makes a difference between hg and git. they are functionally identical (though hg is far better documented to boot). i've been screaming this from the mountain tops for years. oh, and -another- aliasing system on top of bash's is just stupid, so don't even mention it.