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Comment by zajd | Hacker News Reader

It can be though. That's like saying Linux would be better if they only gave you ls, cat and nano because vi, sed and xargs were too complicated.

There is nothing about gitless that provides a decent experience (compared to git) and certainly nothing about gitless that has anything to do with operating at "scale".

The truth is commands like filter-branch, rebase, cherry-pick, etc. which are notoriously difficult to use... you don't even have to use them.

I'm not saying the git experience can't get better, but the way forward is to modify the existing tools and contribute to the project, not make git wrapper number 84 that does nothing special.

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> That's like saying Linux would be better if they only gave you ls, cat and nano because vi, sed and xargs were too complicated.

That's a rather condescending thing to say and not accurate or supportive of the view of git you seem to hold.

> The truth is commands like filter-branch, rebase, cherry-pick, etc. which are notoriously difficult to use... you don't even have to use them.

Until someone on the team _does_ use them and then things can become messed up in ways it takes a git expert to figure out how to fix. I've used git for several years and had never even come across filter-branch, I'd have to chase down the git docs to see what it even does. I never had to filter anything with CVS, Continuus, Perforce, SourceSafe or Subversion.

Here in the real world if you fuck up your local repo by running commands you don't understand there isn't a "git expert" to come by and fix it for you, in the same way if you make a VM and fuck up your local machine there isn't going to be a "linux expert" to come in and explain how to fix what you did wrong.

Part of the benefit of the tool is that you can blow everything away and restart. It's distributed, which means you CAN fuck up your local copy and there are no consequences. It's been years since I've had a repository be in an "unrecoverable" state and part of that is actually taking the time to understand what I'm doing as opposed to just crossing my fingers and hoping shit works.

The fact that other version control systems don't even have some of the power features git has is a big reason git is so popular.

Again, if you don't understand the more complicated commands, don't use them (although you should- they are incredibly powerful and worth learning about). If your team is forcing some bizarre workflow on newer developers that involves using filter-branch and cherry-pick all over the place without good reason, that's an organizational issue, not one with git.

Your points would be more salient if you could make them without falling back on profanity.

They'd also be more salient if I didn't have to make them 10 times in a thread because everyone feels like their opinion on how "git is too hard" is worth sharing. It gets tiring defending git from the uneducated masses and hearing the same stuff trotted out over and over again that has no value whatsoever.

If that many people are making the point, maybe they have a point.

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