13 ms·

I wish there was a version control system that didn't need user input beyond a "push". Only branches and pull requests, nothing more. No commit messages, you ha

I wish there was a version control system that didn't need user input beyond a "push". Only branches and pull requests, nothing more. No commit messages, you have one master branch and however many sub-branches you need. Whatever code is in your branch is what it is. And then there's a layer of magic on top of it all, maybe a UI or command line tool or both, just to be able to easily rewind time. Either per file, per line of code, or folder, or just a folder but not recursive, or the entire branch. Think of Apple's Time Machine, it should be that simple. Honestly, I rarely–if ever–read commit messages to begin with. The way I navigate older code is never done by searching for commit messages. That's not reliable. Instead I simply go to a point in time where I think the thing I'm looking for might be. I'll look at the code, recognise its state, and continue the search up or down the timeline. And that would cover the needs of most projects I'd say. And it would save us a shitload of time. Hell, I've been working with git for almost a decade now. I never needed to rebase or merge things, until I recently did need to do it. It's too arcane to make intuitive sense, to me anyway. Git is good, I'd just welcome a breath of fresh air...

tenken 7y ago
Do you work on a team? Or in a job were you need to have an audit trail for your work? Commit messaged and many other features of Git like branching and tags are indespensible for sharing and collaborating on code.
- eesmith 7y ago
  Flip your questions around. Might someone who isn't on a team, and doesn't need an audit trail, want something simpler? Versioned files systems, including Apple's Time Machine and Dropbox's version history, have no extra UI to save versions. A small, short-lived project with at most a few collaborators (eg, working on a small scientific paper) might find those more useful than git or other VCS.
  - at_a_remove 7y ago
    I would have to agree with this. I have been programming for decades and I haven't had to work on a team for a project. "Branches" have not happened, nor have I ever felt the lack of them. I would not mind something simple. I find the arguments, flags, whatever in git to be rather opaque. That, coupled with the lack of need for its features, have not thrilled me. It seems to be pretty effective if you have tons of programmers working on a single project, but at the bottom end of the scale, I find it baffling.
  - swish_bob 7y ago
    I particularly enjoy IntelliJ's local history, which will go so far as to tell me whether the tests were passing or failing (and how many failed) on a specific file at a specific point in time.
- adrianmsmith 7y ago
  Bit Git isn't great for audit trails given that you can go back and alter previous commits, in contrast to pretty much any other VCS, including Subversion and Fossil. (I know, technically, altering commits creates new commits in Git, but it comes to the same thing.)
  - sigjuice 7y ago
    Are there any documented cases of mainstream projects that have rewritten their history?

tenken 7y ago

Do you work on a team? Or in a job were you need to have an audit trail for your work? Commit messaged and many other features of Git like branching and tags are indespensible for sharing and collaborating on code.

eesmith 7y ago
Flip your questions around. Might someone who isn't on a team, and doesn't need an audit trail, want something simpler? Versioned files systems, including Apple's Time Machine and Dropbox's version history, have no extra UI to save versions. A small, short-lived project with at most a few collaborators (eg, working on a small scientific paper) might find those more useful than git or other VCS.
- at_a_remove 7y ago
  I would have to agree with this. I have been programming for decades and I haven't had to work on a team for a project. "Branches" have not happened, nor have I ever felt the lack of them. I would not mind something simple. I find the arguments, flags, whatever in git to be rather opaque. That, coupled with the lack of need for its features, have not thrilled me. It seems to be pretty effective if you have tons of programmers working on a single project, but at the bottom end of the scale, I find it baffling.
- swish_bob 7y ago
  I particularly enjoy IntelliJ's local history, which will go so far as to tell me whether the tests were passing or failing (and how many failed) on a specific file at a specific point in time.
adrianmsmith 7y ago
Bit Git isn't great for audit trails given that you can go back and alter previous commits, in contrast to pretty much any other VCS, including Subversion and Fossil. (I know, technically, altering commits creates new commits in Git, but it comes to the same thing.)
- sigjuice 7y ago
  Are there any documented cases of mainstream projects that have rewritten their history?