Adam Jackson (ajaxxx) wrote,
2008-06-22 11:18:00
  • Music: front line assembly - future fail

counterintuitive nipples

I tire of people objecting to using git on the basis of bad documentation and UI obscurity. There seems to be a common blind spot here, which is that CVS (which everyone learned first) is just as bad, if not worse. The CVS manual has been getting steadily worse over time, and I challenge anyone reading about cvs up -j for the first time to correctly explain it, let alone sticky tags or binary file handling.

More fundamentally, I think people forget that source control is a very weird and very hard problem. Much like the lower levels of particle physics, you kind of have to implement the behaviour you expect using a model that's not intuitive. That the doc writers for git seem to revel in spewing nerdporn words like "tree-ish" at you is unfortunate, but people like seeing dmesg spew at boot for the same reason: it's obscure and therefore makes you feel cool.

Of course, no one needs to know how pretty much any vcs works under the skin on a daily basis, and that's why sensible git documentation exists. HELLO PEOPLE THE INTERNET HAS SEARCH NOW.
Tags: git
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