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by joppy 2660 days ago
“git show-me-the-code-as-of-last-Wednesday” is not a command that git understands. Of course, you can _do_ this in git, by memorising arcane commands, and you still only get the output on your terminal. The other option is basically using a GUI interface for git.

On the other hand, finding the folder for last Wednesday and opening it up is easy.
4 comments
leadingthenet 2660 days ago
"git log" is a truly arcane command indeed.

Also, pushing your repo to Github / Gitlab / Bitbucket / (a thousand different free services) and then looking at the commit history visually is incredibly difficult.

Come on people, get a grip.

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joppy 2660 days ago
The actual command you need to use is something like “git show HEAD@{2013-02-25}:./file”, which I would count as arcane. And pushing your repo to github and looking at the commit history is using a graphical interface.
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seba_dos1 2660 days ago
No, the actual commands you need to use are "git log", copy the commit ID, and then paste it to "git show <PASTE_COMMIT_ID_HERE>". Of course you can use shortcuts, but those are entirely optional.

For a single-person, single-branch workflow, git is extremely easy. It gets really complicated when doing something more, until you stop seeing git as a VCS tool, but rather as a tool to manipulate the data structure used to do the VCS. But that's a completely different, unrelated topic to this thread.

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skolsuper 2660 days ago
Most people that _play_ dwarf fortress probably memorise more arcane commands than that, let alone the people that write it.
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rcfox 2660 days ago
I've never needed to see the state of the code at a particular date, but I frequently look up when a particular line of code has changed, who did it, and why.
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joppy 2660 days ago
I’m not saying git is bad and you shouldn’t use it, I’m answering the question asked which was “how could anything but git possibly be easier”.
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vharuck 2659 days ago
>The other option is basically using a GUI interface for git.

Unless you don't use a GUI for browsing your file system, you really can't dismiss the GUI that comes with Git. It's easy to use the history browser to check out code from certain dates. And it even simplifies tagging commits so you can check out "release 3" instead of referring to a list of release dates.

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roddds 2660 days ago
git log --since=2019-03-06
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