Git for the nervous developer

http://beust.com/weblog/2010/04/06/git-for-the-nervous-developer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+beust%2FOtakuRdf+%28Otaku%2C+Cedric%27s+weblog%29

by fogus • 16 years ago

98 9 16 years ago

beust.com

ulf• 16 years ago

Very well written and pleasantly neutral. He focuses on a few key issues, which makes the article a very good starting point.

lawrencegs• 16 years ago

nice article! another blog post that push me to leave svn

dlsspy2• 16 years ago

I'm becoming a huge fan of gerrit.

I have to say that I still feel that "git commit -a" is trouble. It's OK to ease one in, but the faster you free yourself from thinking of committing as "saving the state of things" and begin to think of committing as "introducing a change" the more sense it all makes for everyone else.

(I say this having had my team spend a week or so cleaning up a tree for public consumption and hearing them say things like "I don't understand what this change does" -- if we don't understand, we can't publish it)

blasdel2• 16 years ago

"git add -p" is one of my favorite things.

Do you know if anyone's written some porcelain that combines add -p with commit? Maybe you're adding annotations to the hunks as you 'y' them, which then gets inlined into COMMIT_EDITMSG?

cbeust• 16 years ago

dlsspy:

It depends. I make complex merges/branches on a regular basis and I find myself using `commit -a` pretty often, but I am also diligently branching out whenever I start working on something different, so I'm often confident that all the files that are both tracked and modified are the ones I want to commit.

blasedl:

I think that `git add -p` (committing certain changes in a file but not others) is a pretty advanced feature. I can see how it can be a life saver for experienced users, but I recommend creating two branches with each 100% of your changes rather than using just one branch that contains 60% and 40% of your changes.

One switch that I find very useful is `git add -i`, which you should use whenever you want to add 2 files but you have 20 untracked ones in your working directory.

dasil003• 16 years ago

As opposed to its ugly user interface, Git’s underlying infrastructure is very solid and extremely well designed. On top of that, it’s actually not that hard to understand, and once you do, a whole new world will open up.

This is the crux of why I love git and why I think so many people hate it. I love it because at the end of the day what it does under the hood is quite simple and intuitive, as opposed to systems like svn or cvs which even after using for ten times as long still were extremely opaque to me. It's a shame a lot of people can't make it past the interface.

steamboiler• 16 years ago

"On top of that, it’s actually not that hard to understand, and once you do, a whole new world will open up."

While I agree with the author I must point out that it will take some effort for average users to understand what goes on behind the scenes. Especially if they have been using CVS/SVN for long.

I came to git from SVN. It took me a good hour of working through the key diagrams/explanations using a pencil and paper to figure out the git model. And once I did git became a pleasure to work with.

I find that some of my fellow developers are averse to making this initial investment of time and brain cycles to understand the theory of git. Some of them feel that a version control system isn't worth spending time on. Some of this reluctance has to do with how one is introduced to source control. Many learn about version control from "senior developers". More often than not CVS/SVN is explained away as "tracking diffs". Naturally when faced with something like git they ignore it or balk at the idea.

Git for the nervous developer

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