Fine. Git is Awesome. | Hacker News Reader

Fine. Git is Awesome.

justin.harmonize.fm

25 pointsjmtulloss15 comments

Summary

Git is Awesome because it is a Mercurial with easily editable commit history, "better" local branches and the killing feature -- git-svn.

It's also purely content addressed, doesn't attempt to make fake incremental revision numbers, and doesn't enforce any workflow.

Incremental version numbers have proven very useful in many scenarios. I'd be careful to list the lack of support as a feature for git.

I know that support can be hacky at best in a DVCS but often, especially in the common "semi-centralized" workflow, that's good enough. Don't underestimate the communication benefits of being able to talk about specific revisions in chronological context, in plain english. "That was fixed in 982" is much easier to parse and congest for a human than "That was fixed in d934c8" or "That was fixed on last Tuesday".

I agree. I actually wish git had something more like incremental revision #s

I think people need to worry less about their version control system and think more about writing useful code. Seriously, when I look at the time people waste making silly visualizations for commits done on some github project, or doing "version control advocacy", it blows my mind.

Why not do something to improve yourself, like learn C or Lisp, or port some sortware?

"I think people need to worry less about their version control system and think more about writing useful code."

If you seriously think those are in opposition, you either need more experience with version control (preferably a modern one) or more experience with coding in a real environment with many people. Possibly both.

There really isn't any two ways about that. The only two ways you can think version control is worthless is if you've only used worthless version control (Hi, Visual Source Safe!) or you're caught on the wrong end of a Blub paradox.

I have a guy at work who thinks version control is beneath him, too. I say him and his twenty distinct-and-slightly-different versions of critical scripts that require huge maintenance (often incompletely done) for every trivial change are wrong, and I end up paying the price.

Sorry if that came across the wrong way. I intended to say that fanboyism over a version control system seems foolish. I've used a couple version control systems, although currently Plan 9 does all the version control I need with its archival fileserver (works for my kernel modifications).

I would never suggest undertaking a major coding project without some form of version control. However, it's a tool used to improve your work; going nuts over git (which seems to be the fashionable thing these days) is like an artist raving over how great his paintbrushes are and making special little boxes for them, or a carpenter who won't stop talking about his hammer when he's supposed to be roofing your house.

Fair enough. I (obviously) misinterpreted your post as being against version control itself. Fanboyism does suck.

However, DVCS systems are better than the previous state-of-the-art, by enough to be excited about. Not fanboyish about, but certainly excited about.

As a corollary to the argument presented here, I had to give up Git the first two times I tried it because the Subversion integration wasn't all there yet. Git, on it's own, was miraculous and beautiful, but it all fell down when I couldn't push back to Subversion past a branch (this was in the 1.3 days of Git).

Now, though, I couldn't agree with this article more!

Anyone know if there is git-svn integration with Eclipse?

Did you just admit to using Eclipse on this site?

Seriously, though, git-svn is very low on user interface, so you should be able to take the standard git plugin:

http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/EclipsePlugin

and use that for most of your work. When you want to get changes from svn, or commit changes to svn, just open up an xterm and type "git svn rebase" or "git svn dcommit". You may even be able to get Eclipse to run an arbitrary shell command for you, if so, you're set.

Most of you who are punishing jrockway for his mild and inoffensive joke could take lessons from him on how to behave here. He has been an active member of the news.yc community for a couple of years now.

To add to this, it should be stated that downmodding a comment to less than 1 because you simply disagree with it is against the nature of the site. Negative points are for comments that are entirely out of line.

Thanks for the pointer.

Also, my work is gasp enterprise java duck. Eclipse integration with JUnit, Ivy, svn, ant, etc etc, saves me lots of time. My cover is blown :(

The compatibility with subversion is a major point, and reminds me of what Eric Raymond said about Wine being essential for linux to succeed (as macosx parallels is proving as well). See http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-dominat...

There is a pattern here: embrace the legacy without giving up any advantages of the modern.

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