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by zie 1901 days ago
You seem awfully confident of yourself, but I'd disagree with many of those perspectives. Just because you sound confident doesn't mean you are correct.

There is a reason there are 500,000 git tutorials that start with the basics of how git works, and still practically nobody understands git. Despite knowing the underpinnings of how it works practically required to be useful in git.

I agree the implementation matters from a data safety perspective, I mean Jepsen made a name for himself proving how terrible all the "distributed" databases suck(because it's a very hard problem to solve). But as a user, you don't usually have to care... unless it's git.

FreeBSD successfully used SVN for a long time without any major issues, as one example.
1 comments
woofie11 1900 days ago
Very few git tutorials explain how git works. That's the underlying problem. Using git correctly requires knowing how it works. You solve that problem by having a reasonable userspace, like hg, or by having a proper course in college. Much like you learn databases, compilers, and operating systems, you should learn about hash trees and similar data structures.

I feel like the statement "FreeBSD successfully used SVN for a long time without any major issues" is a lot like saying "I wrote books on a typewriter without any major issues." Or "Why do I need pointers/references/data structures? I wrote my code in QuickBASIC without any major issues." Or "DOS doesn't have memory protection or multitasking, and I never had any major issues" or "I wrote my system without documentation or test infrastructure, and it's never been a problem."

At the time you switch to correctly using a DVCS, your productivity skyrockets.

If you're using SVN, you DO have a problem. You might not know you have a problem, but you do. If you're using git like svn, you also have a problem.

I agree with you that many programmers have a problem, though. Just not about the root cause or the solution.

Maybe the right solution is to write a Python implementation of git with a sane user-space. The original git was written in a couple weeks, and I don't think it'd be more than a few months of work to have feature parity.

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