[thatoneuser]

OK hot shot. Tell everyone here how you've never fucked up commands and had to blow out a repo and start over and how were all idiots for having done that.

It's a tool. Any tool can be confusing if the person isn't taught how to use it. Git requires teaching so there's a lot of room for misunderstanding.

[phaemon]

> never fucked up commands and had to blow out a repo and start over

You never have to do this, because it's virtually impossible to screw up a git repo with git commands, to the point it can't be easily fixed. And I'll tell you why and how.

As you no doubt know, all commits in git are hashed. This means that you can't change a commit in any way, only ever add a new one. Neither can you insert a commit into an existing chain: you have to rewrite the whole chain with new commits.

As a consequence, if your `master` branch, for example, is pointing to commit `aa33bf`, there will be a unique chain of commits leading back to the original commit which can't be altered.

It doesn't matter if you cherry-pick, merge, rebase or dance the fandango...if you point `master` back to `aa33bf` it will look exactly the same as it did before.

You can usually find what the branch was pointing before with `git reflog`. But you were going to clone it from github again, right? So, `origin/master` is pointing to the right commit, and you can just reset it back to that (remember to first commit any random stuff in your working dir that you want to keep):

  git checkout master
  git reset --hard origin/master

And, obviously, you can do exactly the same with any other branches that have been messed up.

There you go. Now you too are a "git hot shot" and can wow your friends with your amazing skills. ;)

[thatoneuser]

It's called sarcasm /s

[phaemon]

Yes, I'm aware you were attempting sarcasm, but it wasn't very good, was it? I thought it would be kinder to ignore it and post something useful. The phrase you're looking for is, "thank you".

Cheers!

[tluyben2]

No hot shot either but that literally never happened. It happened with cvs but not with git.

And confusing can be and imho in this case is, something else than difficult.

[scarejunba]

I'm not the hot shot. The hot shots are all the kids from Berkeley and Stanford who figure this shit out as interns while supposedly fully-trained engineers with all the knowledge of data structures that should come with that think this shit is too hard.

I think I'd be completely unsurprised to see an intern successfully use `rerere` on a longer project of theirs.

[darkpuma]

I know of teenagers who happily use git because nobody ever told them they were supposed to consider it hard.

[scarejunba]

This is exactly what I’ve seen. Thank you for validating that viewpoint. Without being told they’re going to find it hard, they just rapidly build a model of how to interact with the tool and how it improves their life.