4 ms·

It may depend on the background of who you're talking to. Programmers may be very comfortable with diffs, but non-programmers (in my case, physics graduate stud

by goerz 6y ago

It may depend on the background of who you're talking to. Programmers may be very comfortable with diffs, but non-programmers (in my case, physics graduate students) usually aren't. On the other hand, everybody is familiar with snapshots: even high school student will end up with "report_v1.docx", "report_v2.docx", etc, which are snapshots at the file level (and work reasonably well as long as you have a consistent scheme and don't need branches). I've also routinely seen less-technical people organize their research / paper writing by making a weekly snapshot of their work folder ("project-2020-04-1"). Telling these people that git basically does the same thing for them automatically with a tree-like "labeling scheme" that allows for branches tends to go over quite well, in my experience. For actually programmers, I'd be inclined to give them a more technical introduction to git's internals. I'd still point out that git stores compressed snapshots, not diffs (especially if they're older and may have previous SVN experience)

hmsimha 6y ago
Those non-programmers are likely going to have a worse understanding of what is happening when you zip/compress something anyway, but I concede this is probably the most straightforward path if they have some understanding of what a zip is, and can't understand what a diff is. But even then I question if they should be using git, since `git diff`, `git show`, basically everything git exposes, is going to show them diffs.
- sagonar 6y ago
  A storage with pure diff would be impossible to recover if you get a error in any commit. It would also be much slower to examine the data, and newer version control do not use pure diff. The version control system Mercurial had description about these problems on the homepage, "behind the scense", which was good reading. I am not sure if GIT is the best solution, but at least a "pure snapshot" is okey, but where a diff storage must in practise include some snapshot logic as well.
  - KptMarchewa 6y ago
    Diff based, but with snapshot "control frame" every N commits, like video? Obviously joking though.

by goerz 6y ago

hmsimha 6y ago

Those non-programmers are likely going to have a worse understanding of what is happening when you zip/compress something anyway, but I concede this is probably the most straightforward path if they have some understanding of what a zip is, and can't understand what a diff is. But even then I question if they should be using git, since `git diff`, `git show`, basically everything git exposes, is going to show them diffs.

sagonar 6y ago
A storage with pure diff would be impossible to recover if you get a error in any commit. It would also be much slower to examine the data, and newer version control do not use pure diff. The version control system Mercurial had description about these problems on the homepage, "behind the scense", which was good reading. I am not sure if GIT is the best solution, but at least a "pure snapshot" is okey, but where a diff storage must in practise include some snapshot logic as well.
- KptMarchewa 6y ago
  Diff based, but with snapshot "control frame" every N commits, like video? Obviously joking though.