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by martinvonz 1588 days ago
> I feel like Git is sufficiently complex - no more than it needs to be and certainly not less.

Perhaps the biggest mistake (IMO) was to expose the index to the user. I happened to just watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31XZYMjg93o (by the person behind Gitless). They explain the issues well there.
3 comments
hinkley 1588 days ago
I'm gonna watch this video. What's been bugging me for a long time, as someone who didn't quite get to see all of the supposed ugliness of Subversion (which by description alone sounds an awful lot like the rerere situation with Git, which I have).

It really feels to me like a commit identifier should be the combination of a monotonically increasing number and a hash of the content, rather than an either-or. If I merge or rebase branches in git, I lose the index, just as I would in subversion. But at least in svn I have some notion of how far back commit 12345 is in the tree. ac4def2 could be HEAD or four years ago.

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KerrAvon 1588 days ago
I haven’t watched that video, but I agree — the index is one of the biggest hurdles to making git easy to understand and use for newcomers. It’s not hard to explain the fundamental model of how git works — it’s hard to explain the UI, and it’s hard to explain the index. If you remove the index, you’re only working with commits, and that simplifies the UI enormously.
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hinkley 1588 days ago
> They told me offline use was a big advantage of git over svn. But, how are you supposed to use git without Google?

Shots fired.

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