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> People who say "just delete the repo" when things go wrong really frustrate me YES. Go be a baker or something! If you're going to be a developer you should

• jimmaswell 2y ago
  I could spend hours of my workday on some uninteresting, irrelevant bullshit because the local repo is fucked, or just delete it and move on to solving actual problems and producing value. The choice is clear.
  • Zambyte 2y ago
    Or you could spend an hour or so learning to use git (or a git compatible vcs like Jujutsu) and then you never bork your repos, and instead spend your time solving actual problems and producing value. What kind of pastries do you like?
    • jimmaswell 2y ago
      I can't remember the last time I had to delete a repo, at most I do a hard reset to the head of the main branch. Still don't care and I'm doing well enough getting consistent maximum performance ratings at my job and building things in my own time. Sometimes a problem is not worth addressing, and part of being an effective software engineer on the whole is recognizing those times.
      • jenadine 2y ago
        Both points are valid. But it shouldn't take hours to "fix" a repo in most cases. As you said: git reset. Anyway, I've been putting some of my repo in very bad states by doing git operation from different unix user that lacked the right permission to do all the writes leaving some corrupted objects and stuff which needs a bit more than just a reset to recover. Then it takes some time to recover, but that's because I also don't want to loose some hours of un-pushed work. Doing a delete of my repo could have been faster but I'd have lost some temporary branches and squashes and stuff that would also represent some work. But I think the original point is for people who are not even able to do a git reset.
      • matrss 2y ago
        So, contrary to your own point, you did indeed put in some time and learned one of the ways you can fix a "fucked" repo, because it is more convenient to just 'git reset --hard main' than to delete and re-clone. There are some simple next steps to go from there: - notice that you don't have to reset to the main branch, you can put in any branch name - it doesn't even have to be a branch name, it can be any kind of reference to a commit - 'git reflog' is useful to find out a reference to a commit you recently were on, that you can then give to reset - you don't have to use --hard, I personally like using --keep, and sometimes you might want to keep local changes so you don't supply those options at all - ... What you already did is what Zambyte suggested you should do. Of course there is diminishing returns at some point, but that point comes way after 'git commit -am $msg && git push'.
    • skeeter2020 2y ago
      >> Or you could spend an hour or so learning to use git This is such nonsense. The git you can learn in an hour gets you exactly to the point where you end up in this "now what?" situation. Furthermore unless you're working through this more regularly than every 6+ months you're not going to remember how to fix it.
      • Zambyte 2y ago
        > Furthermore unless you're working through this more regularly than every 6+ months you're not going to remember how to fix it. Take notes.
  • usr1106 2y ago
    I have never deleted a repo because it's messed up. In the early days understanding what was wrong was sometimes challenging. But once I learned it it's just routine to clean it up. I do occasionally search stuff from my reflog or trial branches from years ago, no way I want to lose that opportunity. One needs to learn full branch names and how the abbreviations used in daily life really work. A local branch called origin/foo can be confusing, especially after being pushed. And of course one needs to understanding the concept of remote branches in the first place, they are not really remote, typical poor git terminology. For mass mess-ups in the work tree git status -s | grep ... oneliners are your friend.
  • matheusmoreira 2y ago
    Or you could actually learn git once and enjoy using a powerful tool without experiencing any of this friction. If you understand git you'll just know what to do when some weird thing happens.
• compressedgas 2y ago
  Instead of turning off the automatic git gc, turn off the reflog expiration with: gc.reflogexpire=never gc.reflogexpireunreachable=never
• zvrba 2y ago
  Git is an abysmal tool for many (most?) uses of it, but that unfortunately has become "standard". The sheer awfulness of git is witnessed by the amount of posts about it and little consensus on "best practices" (e.g., rebase vs merge). So, I don't judge, but sympathize with people who just "delete the repo and start from scratch". Unintuitive, user-hostile tools call for heavy-handed solutions. IME, most people are willing to learn something when they're shown the value for invested effort. That "delete the repo" is standard answer for fixing f*up, tells more about the tool than the people using it. (I.e. it requires disproportionately big investment of time for little value.)
  • DexesTTP 2y ago
    I really don't agree with that. Git is a powerful tool with very few actual downsides, and the unwillingness of some developers to spend an hour learning how it works hurts them in the long-term. It's like sticking to the text editing feature of your IDE because you can't be bothered to learn how it works. Sure, you _technically_ can do that, but you're losing on everything that makes an IDE useful and probably losing actual days or weeks worth of work because of that.
    • Rinzler89 2y ago
      >the unwillingness of some developers to spend an hour learning how it works hurts them in the long-term And that's the problem. Because every developer has spent an hour learning how it works by themselves but then each of them in completely different ways, from different sources, on different projects and workflows, some more correct than others, because there's not one single perfect ground truth way of using git in every situation, but git offers one million ways of shooting yourself in the foot once you land on the job, even after you think you learned git in that one hour. And that IMHO is git's biggest problem: too powerful, too many features, too many ways of doing something, no sane defaults out of the box that everyone can just stick with and start working, too many config variables that you have to tinker with, etc. Case in point, just look at the endless debates in the comments here on what the correct git workflows are wand what the correct config variables are, nobody can agree on anything unanimously on what the right workflow of configs are everyone has their own diverging opinion.
• cedws 2y ago
  I haven’t done that since my junior days. Do people really do this? I know Git’s UX is bad but wow.