Comment by nhaehnle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhaehnle | Hacker News Reader

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People complain, but what's the alternative?

Non-distributed VCS clearly don't cut it for many use cases, and of the other DVCS I've tried, none were really better than Git in my opinion.

Sure, it depends on your workflow. But if part of your workflow is authoring sequences of commits that make sense in hindsight, then I honestly haven't seen an alternative.

The point of Git is that it gets the underlying data model right, and just exposes that. Once you grok that, it is superior to everything else.

If you don't grok it, you have a problem. For this reason, I think GUIs are actually somewhat detrimental for Git use. git gui and gitk serve a purpose, and they could definitely need some polish, but my other explorations into Git GUIs have basically turned out to be badly done and leaky abstractions which hurt more than they help.

Many large companies use Perforce. Its UI is great. It's very easy to learn, so the cost of teaching new employees is low. It's hard to screw up, and when you do screw up, it doesn't require an expert to come in and fix things with obscure commands.

I'm genuinely curious if this isn't an effect of biased in favour of what you know (on both sides, possibly). I found Perforce to be terribly opaque. Perhaps this is because the good stuff is buried amidst enterprise nonsense, but compare the experience of going to git-scm.com versus perforce.com if your goal is to learn.

(Not to mention the fact that Perforce as I know it simply doesn't cover the distributed use cases that Git does. Obviously adding distributed features makes any VCS more complex, but that is the inherent complexity of the problem space as opposed to artificial complexity. If your problem is conceptually easier, you can make the solution appear easier.)

I like Git generally, and my feelings on GUIs for it are kinda mixed. I like GUIs for visualizing the log with all branches, and they make it easier to selectively commit some of your changes, especially partial files. I haven't seen any that are much help over the command line for managing branching and merging, though. I like GitX for OS X because it does the things that I think GUIs are good at, and doesn't try to do much else.

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