Hello, Rich. On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 01:41:05PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Alan Mackenzie <a...@muc.de> wrote:
> > I disagree completely. A little time spent on git is time wasted. Only > > a lot of time spent on git is useful. > I disagree with this. > > git is to VCSs as assembler is to programming languages. To use either > > effectively, you've got to have a complete grasp of the internal logic of > > git/the processor. > I agree with this. > > the collected man pages of git (collected into an info file) > > weigh in at 1.9 Mb. > And if you read them all 12 times it probably wouldn't help you out > with using git one bit. I haven't read most of it, and I'd say that I > grok it. > You really need to take time to understand how git works, and that > doesn't actually take that much time. I've spent many tens of hours in the last year trying to get to grips with git, ever since a project I work on (Emacs) converted to using git. There are all sorts of stupidities in it - like `push' and `pull' not being opposites, `clone' not producing a clone, but a new repository radically different from the original. Unnecessary arcane teminology, and standard terminology perversely used to mean something different. When everything works just fine, according to the book, I now have few problems. But when something goes wrong - like merge conflicts, for example, I end up spending, perhaps, two hours searching the doc for an answer then end up asking for help on the project mailing list. With the same problems in, say, hg or cvs, the answers would be clear within a few minutes of opening the doc. > The man pages are mainly used to figure out what Linus named the > command line option you're looking for when he was drunk and creating > a new subcommand. Git has a beautiful design and a horrible > interface. I can accept that. > If you understand the design you'll know that there must be a way to > do something, but you'll spend 15min figuring out which command line > utility does it best. I don't want to have to understand the design. I just want to be a user. I've got enough things competing for limited mental capacity as it is. > -- > Rich -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
