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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Yep, it was designed by and for linux kernel development, that average users are using it is an accident of history.

So what are the chances that a version of Git, or something like Git, will be developed that is suitable for the average user? Someone above made a comment about how easy it is to do X in Git, and then preceded to write lines of Git commands that are as arcane as anything an alchemist could come up with. If that is easy Git, I'd hate to see what hard Git looks like.

Making it could be done, Mercurial already exists for example. Perhaps a next-gen version introduced with all the lessons learned over the last decade.

Getting folks to use it would be very difficult due to network effects however.

So true. I live a mercurial life, in a git world. Thanks to hg-git, it is easy to use it and just treat the remote git repository as a black box.

After having rewritten history locally (with Mercurial this is easy, powerful, safe and with a lot of tooling available) everything you need to do is doing an hg push --force.

For one, hg histedit with its curses interface (default since 4.9) is sweet.

Git is really a toolkit for version control. Linus (or some other Git proponents?) distinguishes between "plumbing" and "porcelain": the infrastructure and the UI.

Linus wouldn't claim to be a brilliant designer of user interfaces. It's totally conceivable that somebody could come along and develop a new way of talking about Git's functionality, implemented by a new "porcelain". Changing the vocabulary, creating a more comprehensible map of the internal logic of the thing...

Unfortunately, none of the porcelains caught on, because all of the power users use plain git.

Except those of us using magit instead ;)

Who knows what the future holds. Once upon a time all the power users used assembly language.

Don't hope for git to become something else. Something else will be something else.

In reality, git is actually far from ideal tool, with its own weak points and use-case scenarios which it simply not or badly supports. So it's never "just you" don't feel bad that it's "hard." On top of this, even the scenarios that it supposedly "good" supports demand sometimes totally "illogical" combination of the names and parameters.

git is used in spite of its flaws for different reasons. Some actions are really very fast, faster than by the competition. Sometimes that is a reason enough. Another is -- we have to use what our colleagues use. Even another: once you become familiar with it, even if you were aware of the weirdness, it can stop annoying you. Still to be able to realistically compare it with something else, you have to at least try it. And that something else too.

Something like Darcs is probably going to be the next generation. The nice thing about Darcs is that it records patches in an order independent fashion. This means that you can reorder your commits without penalty. This allows you to remove pretty much all problems requiring ninja-like skills to fix in Git. Darcs, has performance problems on merges, though (as a result of its approach). However, I remember a while ago about someone saying they found a solution to the problem. I think they meant to write a new system, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.

Anyway, once you get rid of the actual complexity in git, it's an easy step to work on the added complexity to the UI.

Pijul (https://pijul.org/) is based on a categorical theory of patches (https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.3903). It is similar to Darcs but written in Rust. They claim that Pijul has solved the exponential merge problem. The docs, FAQ, and blogs, in particular the last one, are interesting readings.

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