this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Programming

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Why Git is hard (roadrunnertwice.dreamwidth.org)
submitted 1 year ago by learnbyexample to c/programming
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (19 children)

A much simpler solution: don't use the git CLI. And in my professional life I don't know a single person who does. The shortcomings of git have long been abstracted away and as problematic as the CLI is, it's now just an internal library of the tools we actually use.

Also the git pull criticism is weird. Yeah it exists on paper, and year every so often once in a blue moon there's a conflict after a pull with rebase, but... this doesn't even begin to dent the oodles of time saved from just doing Ctrl+T in IntelliJ and be up-to-date with no further input. Why waste 20 minutes 40x-100x a day instead of 45 minutes once every 3-6 months? Especially this case:

My favorite version of this is when the novice has followed someone's dodgy advice to set pull.rebase = true, then they pull a shared branch that they're collaborating on, into which their coworker has just merged origin/main. Instant Sorcerer's Apprentice-scale chaos!

I'm sorry, but are you collaborating or competing on a shared branch? If it is a collaborative effort, maybe just talk about it? And in fact, unless the other person is an utter asshole, they'll have done so before merging in the new changes from main. That's not even to mention that in 99,95% of cases or so, that exact scenario is perfectly fine and gets resolved without any issues whats-o-ever and no user input necessary. Bringing us once again to the situation where you save a moderate amount of time multiple times a day by always just pulling.

(edit)
Don't get me wrong, all of this criticism is of course valid. But it feels like a very arcane case, as no project should be able to produce the issues frequently unless there's some underlying problem in either the mode of collaboration or the structure of the project in the first place, and the usage of git is long abstracted away and the tools handle virtually any and all edge case, including making merging far smarter than if you were to use the CLI.

[–] atheken 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I’ve used the git cli exclusively for more than a decade, professionally. I guess it varies wildly by team, but CLIs are the only unambiguous way to communicate instructions, both for humans and computers. That being said, I still don’t mess around with rebase for anything, and I do use a gui diff tool for merge conflict resolution. Practically everything you need to do with git can be done with like 10 commands (I’m actually being generous here, including reset, stash, and tag).

[–] technom 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That being said, I still don’t mess around with rebase for anything

Rebasing has a worse reputation than it deserves. It's something you just get used to - just like how git use is, when you started using it. There are a couple of strategies to make it easier and less anxiety inducing:

  1. Before starting a rebase of a long branch, create a new branch. That way in case you seriously mess up, you can just delete the rebasing branch and rename the old branch to restore everything (you can usually get away with rebase abort. This is just added safety). Even in case of a successful rebasing, you can just keep the backup branch around, as a faithful record of actual development history.
  2. Do only one (or max 2) operations in a single rebases. Do this over multiple rebases to get what you want.

After a while, rebasing becomes as simple as commit or merging.

[–] atheken 2 points 1 year ago

Rebasing and merge conflicts are the top ways that git can turn into a mess. I know that rebasing could (in some circumstances) make merge conflicts less of an issue, but I just mostly think the value of "commit grooming" is overrated. I don't want to argue about this, if you like doing it, go ahead.

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