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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Git Logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I've only worked in software for about 15 years, so don't have much experience outside of git.
But my first job used Microsoft Team Foundation, and I didn't need any experience to know that user experience sucked. I've also done the "date named zip file" type of version control, which is not ideal.
When I started using git it just made sense to me, have had no major complaints since.
I've been using Git professionally as a software developer for 15 years, and I think it sucks quite hard. There is always a dosen ways to do the same thing, it occupies tons of hardware space, it's log is unstructured data that has to be parsed. Git CLI is an incomprehensible mess of bloat and misnomers, so no matter what team/project you are working on, there is always going to be 1-5 Git commands they'll tell "you are NEVER supposed to use".
I've completed my courses on Git, I've worked with CI/CD, onboarded younger developers, read "Git Koans", and I haven't seen even a theoretically convenient VCS until someone showed me Pijul.
Git is mess, it sucks that we are stuck with it, and every time someone says it's the best VCS we have, it saddens me.
Local vcs let's you decouple saving progress (commit) from publishing your change (push).
This is a huge improvement over exclusive locks (old visual source safe) and shared server (like perforce).
There are many other improvements, but that is the one that had the most impact on my daily workflow.
I had a sad incident where I had committed changes but not pushed, and then I accidentally spilled a drink on my computer and bricked it. Even though this is unlikely to happen again because I won't bring open containers like mugs or bowls of soup around computers anymore (water bottles are fine), and it was only three hours of work lost, because of this incident I do not feel I have saved until I have pushed. "What if you brick your computer again, huh, where's all that progress now?"
But overall I agree about decoupling saving changes from actually publishing them!
How did it change how I think about version control? Not much? The goals are still the same. It only does many things better than previous centralized tools.
When DVCS came up and became popular, I used Git and Bzr.
At work, we used subversion. In one project, we had one SVN repository in our office and the customer had one in their office. A colleage had created a sync util. We regularly synced all history into an external hard drive, drove to the customer, and merged it there. Required a thorough and checklist process, potentially conflict resolution, and changelog generating for the big merge commit. Then drive back to the office, and merge back there.
Of course sometimes you used remote desktop to hotfix changes in their code base. Meaning you'd now have the change in two places as different commits.
Anyway, I've never found Git difficult. I used it, learned and understood it, and it's consistent. I know enough "internals"/technical details to understand and use it well and without confusion.
As an ancient ops person, I was unfamiliar with version control before git. So git has really changed how I look at look at version control!
The staging area changed the way I work for the better. When I develop something, a file can be at the same time "not modified yet," in progress where I can carefully accept or reject the modifications, and partially done when the parts have been confirmed and added to the staging area.
Once nothing is "in progress" anymore, I know that my future commit is almost perfect and I can quickly review my stuff before committing. It’s faster and more safe than other tools.
Too new to have come from older vcs, but I can tell it's a clear improvement over zip files.