10 things I hate about Git

Git is a generic management tool for a directed acyclic graph, applied to version control. Once you internalize that, everything falls into place, trivially.

11. Github.<p>Don't get me wrong - Github is an excellent site, well built and very useful. However there is a rapidly growing trend of people taking Github as the <i>only</i> place open-source software can live, while I choose to host my own repositories. Github is becoming the Facebook of open-source.<p>Am I the only person who feels this way?

It seems like no matter how much time I spend trying to learn git and its commands I still continue to only understand a tiny sliver of them. The rest I figure out by browsing random stackoverflow questions as the need arises.

I don't understand why people equate rebase with lying. I work on a team of 12 devs, and pre rebase workflow, gitk sort of looked like a rainbow due to it showing the actual interactions of each developers branch at the chronological time it happened. It was so complex that git bisect often couldn't find bad commits unless you used it a specific way. Basically it made the history next to useless. Post rebase, we see branch work serially, which makes it easy to find a bad commit, and obvious to see the transformations of the main branch of code.<p>I think people who complain about this fall into one of three camps:<p>1 - Are not using a topic branch workflow, and don't understand the hell that wreaks in history 2 - Are doing fast forward merges to merge branches back into the mainline, which makes it hard to see the points that development finished and the merge actually happened. 3 - Are rebasing long lived branches<p>It is just such a common complaint, and I have yet to hear of any down side that actually makes sense to me as someone who has a fair understanding of git

Surprised to not see git-rebase cited in #3.<p>&#62; git-rebase - Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head<p>I avoided rebasing for the longest time because of that. If it had just said "puts your stuff in front of their stuff" it would've been a lot less intimidating.

My pet peeve has always been the staging area. It encourages partial commits which couldn't have been tested because they never actually existed in the filesystem.<p>I <i>like</i> rewriting history, though. If I commit A then B, then realize A was wrong, I test and commit a fix then autosquash it so my history goes A' then B. Historical commits which didn't work are worse than useless, and if someone branched from them, the sooner we all figure it out and fix it the better. And the ugly truth will still be there in the reflog for a month.

It seems like there's a huge opportunity for big software player to develop a git clone that is understandable and has a great UI. I'm thinking of Microsoft. Build the thing right into VS, it becomes the new standard for business source code management.<p>Everyone talks up git, but few every seem to actually use it, or use it to its full potential. And I agree that this has a lot to do with a crappy interface.<p>If git is truly the next great step in source code management, shouldn't it be easy to use? Isn't that kinda the definition of great software? You shouldn't have to be a linux command-line cowboy to have to use and understand git.

You don't hate git, you hate that you have to use it. And that in order to use it you have to get smarter. Smarter about computers, and smarter about managing your code.<p>But don't be discouraged, git really is simple. It's dead simple. The command line syntax is super annoying, i'll give you that, but the underlying tech is a collection of simple concepts that meld into a complex powerful tool.<p>The first thing you need to do, is to stop thinking of git in terms of github. Git is designed to be a decentralized vcs, and you really need to think/learn about what that means. It's crucial. The prevalence of github means that most people will never even use it in a non centralized way, and while incredibly convenient, it undermines the learning process just a little.<p>The next thing you need to do, is just read progit -&#62; <a href="http://progit.org/book/" rel="nofollow">http://progit.org/book/</a> . In fact that's really the first thing you should do. Stop thinking you can pick up git through osmosis and just read the damn book. At least by then if you still hate it you'll have more poignant issues to touch on.