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Hard agree. Weekly, I witness co-workers confused about git, I see posts online asking for help, I see articles like the one here once again trying in vain to

Hard agree. Weekly, I witness co-workers confused about git, I see posts online asking for help, I see articles like the one here once again trying in vain to explain something that should be simple. In all my time coding, I don't remember anyone wasting hours trying to undo some mess they'd made in SVN, TFVC, Perforce, etc. Tools exist to make our lives easier. If they can't do that, they don't deserve our time.

jstimpfle 3y ago
It is a true power tool. It does need an initial investment to get over the hump but I would never go back to SVN. It doesn't take a huge amount of time to really learn the basic concepts and then maybe the 10 most used commands (I suggest using git cat-file -p to navigate a repo and history manually). There is a wealth of functionality and an inconsistent terminology, but you can quickly look that up when you actually need it.
- metabagel 3y ago
  I feel like some people are better at the context switch between the project they are working on and git. I am not good at that context switch.
jtolmar 3y ago
I remember seeing people blow up their SVN projects fairly often, usually from trying to move folders around without telling it. Though I don't remember those turning into three developers hovering over one computer the way that git errors so often do.
Izkata 3y ago
Confusion over svn was standard operating procedure over here for years before teams started using git regularly. I think I'm still the only one here that really understands how svn merge and svnmerge.py work, and have had to detangle plenty of messes over the years. We'd kind of standardized on trunk-based development because everyone was afraid of even attempting merges.
fijiaarone 3y ago
But git has a very slightly improved merge algorithm than svn (so they say) — but merge conflicts were less painful and less likely to happen on svn. The only real advantage git has is bandwidth and disk space —- not that it uses bandwidth and disk space more efficiently —- only that we all have more of both, so it seems more useful than subversion (or whatever else you were using before) when you had limited disk space so you didn’t pass around infinite copies of everything.
leokennis 3y ago
The worst thing is that GIT makes some people NOT do version management. To avoid dealing with GIT, they’ll go https://xkcd.com/1597/ https://xkcd.com/1597/ and so suddenly major rewrites of code are suddenly one “pull - stage - commit - push - PR” affecting 100’s of files…

jstimpfle 3y ago

It is a true power tool. It does need an initial investment to get over the hump but I would never go back to SVN. It doesn't take a huge amount of time to really learn the basic concepts and then maybe the 10 most used commands (I suggest using git cat-file -p to navigate a repo and history manually). There is a wealth of functionality and an inconsistent terminology, but you can quickly look that up when you actually need it.

metabagel 3y ago
I feel like some people are better at the context switch between the project they are working on and git. I am not good at that context switch.

jtolmar 3y ago

I remember seeing people blow up their SVN projects fairly often, usually from trying to move folders around without telling it. Though I don't remember those turning into three developers hovering over one computer the way that git errors so often do.

Izkata 3y ago

Confusion over svn was standard operating procedure over here for years before teams started using git regularly. I think I'm still the only one here that really understands how svn merge and svnmerge.py work, and have had to detangle plenty of messes over the years. We'd kind of standardized on trunk-based development because everyone was afraid of even attempting merges.

fijiaarone 3y ago

But git has a very slightly improved merge algorithm than svn (so they say) — but merge conflicts were less painful and less likely to happen on svn. The only real advantage git has is bandwidth and disk space —- not that it uses bandwidth and disk space more efficiently —- only that we all have more of both, so it seems more useful than subversion (or whatever else you were using before) when you had limited disk space so you didn’t pass around infinite copies of everything.

leokennis 3y ago

The worst thing is that GIT makes some people NOT do version management. To avoid dealing with GIT, they’ll go https://xkcd.com/1597/ https://xkcd.com/1597/ and so suddenly major rewrites of code are suddenly one “pull - stage - commit - push - PR” affecting 100’s of files…