[skrebbel]

I expected much more from this, off the title.

Look, Git is a major pain in the ass because it's designed to support every possibly imaginable workflow. The only way to do this is to just expose Git's internals, i.e. make users think like Git, instead of making Git think like its users. This fits the minds of kernel hackers perfectly (they think like computers do all the time), so there's your history-of-Git in a one-liner as a free bonus.

The only way to make Git more usable is to make a frontend that carefully and in a well thought out way enforces a certain workflow. It'll be more usable for people who use that workflow, then (and, obviously, less usable once you want to step outside that workflow)

git-flow [1] is a nice example of this. I'd love to see more examples for additional workflows. I'm also very curious whether it's possible to do this without leaky abstractions, i.e. to really have a team up and running that doesn't understand anything about Git, and only understands the workflow. Did anyone using git flow manage that? (i.e. have devs never touch 'bare' git)

[1][http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/]