Git

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Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

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Article argues that git is intrinsically confusing--if you could redesign git from scratch, what would you change? (dl.acm.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/git

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[–] Corbin 2 points 7 months ago

I agree that the UX of existing git commands is not great. They evolved in a particular insular environment -- Linux kernel development with heavy mailing-list usage and large multi-headed merges, with occasional pull requests and manual integration testing.

Check out my top-level comment for a link to git's data model. A data-first approach with blob, tree, commit, and tag can be enlightening. The on-disk format tries to balance integrity, easy manipulation, disk space, and incremental updates; it's also weakly monoidal, enabling distributed development. Look up the history of Bitkeeper and git; this is "a version control system [designed] from the ground up with documented architecture from the start"! And there are many non-C implementations as a result, like pure-Python dulwich.