Git is awful

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

This is so true:

Git doesn’t so much have a leaky abstraction as no abstraction. There is essentially no distinction between implementation detail and user interface. It’s understandable that an advanced user might need to know a little about how features are implemented, to grasp subtleties about various commands. But even beginners are quickly confronted with hideous internal details. In theory, there is the “plumbing” and “the porcelain” – but you’d better be a plumber to know how to work the porcelain.

A common response I get to complaints about Git’s command line complexity is that “you don’t need to use all those commands, you can use it like Subversion if that’s what you really want”. Rubbish. That’s like telling an old granny that the freeway isn’t scary, she can drive at 20kph in the left lane if she wants. Git doesn’t provide any useful subsets – every command soon requires another; even simple actions often require complex actions to undo or refine.

Here was the (well-intentioned!) advice from a GitHub maintainer of a project I’m working on (with apologies!):

Find the merge base between your branch and master: ‘git merge-base master yourbranch’

Assuming you’ve already committed your changes, rebased your commit onto the merge base, then create a new branch:

git rebase –onto HEAD~1 HEAD

git checkout -b my-new-branch

Checkout your ruggedisation branch, and remove the commit you just rebased: ‘git reset –hard HEAD~1′

Merge your new branch back into ruggedisation: ‘git merge my-new-branch’

Checkout master (‘git checkout master’), merge your new branch in (‘git merge my-new-branch’), and check it works when merged, then remove the merge (‘git reset –hard HEAD~1′).

Push your new branch (‘git push origin my-new-branch’) and log a pull request.

Translation: “It’s easy, Granny. Just rev to 6000, dump the clutch, and use wheel spin to get round the first corner. Up to third, then trail brake onto the freeway, late apexing but watch the marbles on the inside. Hard up to fifth, then handbrake turn to make the exit.”

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://steveko.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/
Source