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This will sound flippant but it's an honest question: who cares? I use git all day, every day. Sometimes CLI, sometimes a dedicated UI (e.g. GH desktop but hav
by pc86 2y ago
This will sound flippant but it's an honest question: who cares?
I use git all day, every day. Sometimes CLI, sometimes a dedicated UI (e.g. GH desktop but have also used Tower and other dedicated tools), sometimes a UI in something else a la VSCode. I write code every day.
Why should I care at all about rebase vs. merge, whether the internals of git are optimal, whether index needs to exist at all or what it even is?
I think this is sort of what the other comment is getting at about a replacement needing to be much better and that git is good enough. I can count on one hand the number times I've ever needed to glean information out of old commit messages and when something got merged into something else.
Arguing about git workflows and whether you should rebase, merge, squash merge, trunk deployment, gitflow, etc. all seems like ultimate bikeshedding to me. If you're shipping code and making money your git workflow is irrelevant. If your project is so convoluted and broken and you're gaining actual useful information from a 2-year old commit message that you couldn't get just by looking at the code it feels like something else is fundamentally broken that better git internals are not going to address.
- rob74 2y agoI would care if a new VCS would make my life easier. This quote from the linked article: > very few working developers have a good mental model for Git. Instead, they have a handful of commands they have learned over the years: enough to get by, and little more. ...pretty much describes me TBH. I know enough of git to get by day to day, but if I need to do more than that, I have to rely on StackOverflow et al. Which is always frustrating and feels like a waste of time.
- stevage 2y agoI have used git for many years, have over 250 repos on GitHub and have written several blog posts about it. This is definitely me. I will never understand it.
- pc86 2y agoI would try a new VCS if it made my life easier too, but I think my point is just that the quote you posted is not only accurate for most developers, but that there's nothing wrong with that. Having a perfect mental model of how git works is going to be a waste of time for anyone who doesn't want to actually work on git itself.
- steveklabnik 2y agoI mean, you can use this logic to favor the status quo in any given circumstance. Some people are of course happy with that, but some folks want to try and improve. Not everyone has to care, but not everyone has to not care, either. I swapped to jj because it’s both easier to use and more powerful than git. To me, anyway. And I was a “you can take git from my cold dead fingers” type person. A “the git cli is fine” type of person.
- stevage 2y agoThat's all well and good if a) you almost always work in the same repo; or B) you are in charge of the repos you work in. Often these are not true for me. I have no deal with other people's repos, dealing with merge or rebase depending on their conventions etc.