Git is ... alright, but it doesn't deserve quite as much praise as it gets. I have well over a decade of experience using source control at a fairly high level, and I have experience with a wide variety of source control systems. Git is currently more or less the best thing that's out there in a lot of ways, but it still has a whole shit-ton of shortcomings.
Even when you use git according to the finest shade grown, hand picked, organic best practices available you are still going to routinely run into situations where dealing with git is just a straight up pain in the ass for no good reason. Every source control system has its weaknesses but in some ways git's are even more annoying because so much of the rest of it is engineered so well. It's like opening up the trunk on a maserati and finding a compartment that's lined with splintery unfinished recycled pallet wood and held together by chewing gum, it makes you wonder why it's there and why having some piece that is such a comparatively low quality continues to be tolerated year after year.
Again, overall I think git is pretty great, but the persistent lack of effort toward improving git's core weaknesses is incredibly frustrating.
Not my experience at all. Most devs I have met in real life love git. It is certainly not perfect but it is good and way better than what came before. I would be happy if someone wrote a replacement which improved substantially upon git but if that never happens that would be fine too.
Git is the worst piece of software I actually use. It is impossible to use safely and without headaches unless (a) you only do the same, simple things every time, or (b) you're an expert. And yet, pretty much all programmers have to use it every day.
That's interesting. I've been using git every day for about 8 years, I've never found myself in a situation where I couldn't fix something I broke. But maybe that time will come.
We say this now, ignoring the hot messes that were SourceSafe, Pervasive, CVS, and SVN. Git is light years more elegant that predecessors, and its holding power is evidence of that. We're able to criticize now because we've had the privilege of forgetting (or never having experienced) just how bad it used to be, and the sheer amount of time with one tool that's been a staple for far longer than previous tools lasted.
As someone who has used GIT a fair amount over the last 15 years, it has literally one of the worst developer experiences, right up there with C, python’s package management, cuda kernel development or shader debugging, ffmpeg, Scala, MongoDB, and Rust. All of those tools are very useful in todays world but they’re not necessary to do the job,and unless I’m specifically hiring for that skillset I wouldn’t ding anyone who didn’t know them.
Why is git so successful? It has good internals and has had those good internals for years and years, which covered up for its many flaws. Add on to that: network effect due to linux, github, and gitlab all using git.
Git is great, compared to most of the alternatives. But is it perfect? Of course not. Is it hugely flawed in parts? Of course it is. It has a UX designed by freaking engineers FFS, it's surprising it's as usable as it is.
The observation that git forces you to learn how its guts work so that when you inevitably end up in some scary situation with the potential of losing or screwing up revision history you know enough to work your way out of it is not a strong argument. It's similar to the lament about how older cars were so much easier to work on and that made them better. Better if you want to work on cars, perhaps, but a vehicle that requires constant maintenance is not superior to today's cars that can be run for 100k miles with minimal engine work and a single set of spark plugs, and are also safer, more efficient, and cleaner to boot. The same thing goes for VCSes, if you're regularly, or ever, getting into hairy revision history problems that's a sign of a weakness in your VCS and/or workflow.
I want to thank you for posting. I know that the groupthink around Git, especially on forums like this one, is so powerful that by even mentioning that Git has flaws and isn't some kind of angelic perfect software from heaven runs the risk of having a billion down votes.
This is maybe the most cogent version of my exact feelings on git I’ve ever read. In theory, I have no issues with git! In practice, the UX is often very very bad.
Having worked with CVS, Perforce, subversion, bzr, mercurial, and git, in distributed teams, as a sole developer and in large local teams for over 20 years, I can't think of a single plausible situation in which git is not superior in every way to all the other version control systems.
Git is a tool, and it's certainly not going to be a 'flip a switch and everything is better'. It does require that you define how you're going to use it in your particular context, but the only tradeoff I can see with git is learning it. It's interface and naming is an absolute horror show of usability, but its no worse that something like regular expressions or vim/emacs. But once it's in place, you have change management calculus, and everything else was algebra at best.
I understand the frustration of people who are used to having the benefits of open history in addition to open source. And who don't want to step back 10 years and learn dead end technologies, and who aren't used to being confronted with ivory towerism or gatekeeperism.
Otoh, I also understand why a maintainer would want to keep their codebases close to their chest, when they've achieved expert level finesse in a project/codebase, and the noob hordes with their ill-conceived ideas demand responses to their pull requests because they spent their free time writing some crap, and demand you spend your free time educating them on why their patch is a tub full of fail.
That's nonsense. Git is the best version control history of all time. It has some regrettable UX difficulties, but as far as the system itself, there is no better decentralized development tool.
There's a reason git came into existence for linux kernel development. The linux kernel is a project so massive and so decentralized that it needed a fitting tool to be able to tame the chaos. And git did that perfectly.
Out of curiosity though, what to you is a better source control system?
I feel like the fact that we have these incessant conversations about how to use git just show that the interface is inherently broken. New programmers always struggle with git. The naming of the commands is bizarre and confusing. The docs are overbearing and a lot of the time the fact that it's powerful in weird edge cases is seen to trump all of its flaws. That said I haven't seen anything better or even close to its usefulness.
Lack of any real competition may be an issue there.
I can't think of any other tool that hasn't given me headaches at least once a day.
Git is actually remarkable tech and its unfortunate that the prevailing hivemind opinion is that its bad.
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