this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Git

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Article argues that git is intrinsically confusing--if you could redesign git from scratch, what would you change? (dl.acm.org)
submitted 8 months ago by testeronious@lemmy.world to c/git@programming.dev
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[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well, I can't read it... But I would say it's nonsense that Git is intrinsically confusing. The core data model is extremely simple and intuitive. The problems are:

  • Terrible CLI.
  • Terrible terminology (index is probably the worse; why not draft commit?)
  • Bad tutorials. Lots of them explain things wrong or just confusingly
  • It's a fundamentally visual problem yet so many people advise against using a GUI.

It's like trying to explain CAD using OpenSCAD instead of SOLIDWORKS. Of course it's going to seem like CAD is confusing.

That's not to say Git's data model is perfect. What's there is decent but there are big gaps. Support for large files is bad (LFS is a hack). Support for very large projects is bad (monorepos tend to get slow and sparse checkouts are difficult; submodules have lots of issues). Conflict resolution tends to be very dumb, though I think there are some projects to improve that.

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It’s a fundamentally visual problem

In what way do you mean git versioning is fundamentally visual?

Or do you mean understanding it or visualising it? The data and its relationships?

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

Git is a graph of commits and you can't really display a graph in any way except visually. Even the CLI has a way of showing it visually (git log --graph).

Think about other graphs you might interact with, e.g. node graphs in 3D graphics of music production. How many of them do you manipulate with a CLI?