[asmdev]

To be fair to the people whose merges failed, I believe this is a shortcoming of git (the tool) and not the people using it.

It is fair to expect a developer to invest sometime in learning their tools well but git is a different beast. I know it solves a very complex problem but the fact that it exposes a complex interface to the user to do so seems like a shortcoming of the tool to me.

Heck, we even have a comic for it that shows how sometimes just saving my work, deleting my clone, re-cloning the repo and applying the changes in my work is easier than understanding the Git error messages: https://xkcd.com/1597/.

The tooltip in the comic is also sound advice: If that doesn't fix it, git.txt contains the phone number of a friend of mine who understands git. Just wait through a few minutes of 'It's really pretty simple, just think of branches as...' and eventually you'll learn the commands that will fix everything.

[nathan_f77]

Haha nooooo, it's really not that difficult! I really don't think git is a different beast. It's much, much harder to master a programming language or web framework.

Compared to something like Rails, iOS development, or React + Redux + Redux Saga, Git is just a couple of commands and basic concepts. Everything is listed here, and I don't think that's an unreasonable number of commands to know: https://git-scm.com/docs

[asmdev]

The number of commands you show may not be unreasonable. But after spending many years in the industry, I think it is far easier for me to learn C++ with all its different types of pointers than it is to learn what Git is trying to tell me when I have screwed up something.

Either Git has a complex user interface like I claim or I am beginning to grow old.

[mi100hael]

> To be fair to the people whose merges failed, I believe this is a shortcoming of git (the tool) and not the people using it.

I disagree. Like everyone, I've experienced a failed merge that turns into a diff nightmare. However, when it has happened I've figured out how to solve it myself instead of wasting someone else's time with it, and it hasn't happened in years now leading me to believe it is directly correlated with git skill-level.