Git is too complex for most of us

7 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by thunderbong

6 Comments

geophile

15 hours ago

I came to source code control reluctantly. CVS, SourceSafe, others I’ve forgotten. One of them was very expensive, very complex, took months of customization, and then it scrambled our bits following a disk crash and the vendor had to piece things back together. An expensive nightmare.

I finally started using Subversion, and it finally clicked. Easy to understand and use. It did everything I needed, and it was intuitive. But git was gaining popularity and eventually that was the only “choice”. And I don’t get git at all. I can do a few things that I need. I often have to consult google or experts for help. While I get the concepts, the commands are incomprehensible to me. I hate it.

biglyburrito

14 hours ago

Subversion & Mercurial were decent. SourceSafe is utter trash. I've learned to use Git, but I've always used an IDE; I hate the CLI commands.

wmf

12 hours ago

People should try Gitless first because it's compatible with Git.

m463

13 hours ago

linux is full of these sorts of tools.

git is super useful, but arcane.

make is also important and useful, but needlessly complicated.

emacs is... you get the picture.

jauntywundrkind

13 hours ago

Maybe. But most people who work from this basis are going to build bad tools that don't do nearly enough, that are far worse in the long run.

nacozarina

14 hours ago

nothing wrong with git, fossil is morbidly obese, an RDBMS is an unserious thing to embed in an scm engine, and sqlite shouldn’t be used for anything important at all.