[zvrba]

Git is an abysmal tool for many (most?) uses of it, but that unfortunately has become "standard". The sheer awfulness of git is witnessed by the amount of posts about it and little consensus on "best practices" (e.g., rebase vs merge).

So, I don't judge, but sympathize with people who just "delete the repo and start from scratch". Unintuitive, user-hostile tools call for heavy-handed solutions.

IME, most people are willing to learn something when they're shown the value for invested effort. That "delete the repo" is standard answer for fixing f*up, tells more about the tool than the people using it. (I.e. it requires disproportionately big investment of time for little value.)

[DexesTTP]

I really don't agree with that. Git is a powerful tool with very few actual downsides, and the unwillingness of some developers to spend an hour learning how it works hurts them in the long-term.

It's like sticking to the text editing feature of your IDE because you can't be bothered to learn how it works. Sure, you _technically_ can do that, but you're losing on everything that makes an IDE useful and probably losing actual days or weeks worth of work because of that.

[Rinzler89]

>the unwillingness of some developers to spend an hour learning how it works hurts them in the long-term

And that's the problem. Because every developer has spent an hour learning how it works by themselves but then each of them in completely different ways, from different sources, on different projects and workflows, some more correct than others, because there's not one single perfect ground truth way of using git in every situation, but git offers one million ways of shooting yourself in the foot once you land on the job, even after you think you learned git in that one hour.

And that IMHO is git's biggest problem: too powerful, too many features, too many ways of doing something, no sane defaults out of the box that everyone can just stick with and start working, too many config variables that you have to tinker with, etc. Case in point, just look at the endless debates in the comments here on what the correct git workflows are wand what the correct config variables are, nobody can agree on anything unanimously on what the right workflow of configs are everyone has their own diverging opinion.

[frankjr]

I think you've just described why Git is so popular and literally everywhere.

[Rinzler89]

Something being popular doesn't mean it's universally good everywhere and loved by everyone. Windows and Teams are also popular, almost every company uses them, that doesn't make them good. Diesel ICE cars are also highly popular in Europe even though they're much worse for our air quality and health. Do you see the issue with using popularity as an argument?

I've met many devs who hate git with a passion but they just have to use it because management said so and because evry other workplace now uses it, just like Teams and Windows. Not saying git is bad per se, just pointing out the crater of pitfalls it opens up.

[frankjr]

Right but the world is bigger than corporate and yet I don't see anyone choosing anything else for their pet project large or small either. If Git was such a pain to use, wouldn't a lot of open source projects use something else? I know OpenBSD uses CSV, SQLite uses Fossil.. I can't honestly think of anything else non-Git right now that I use (I'm sure I'm missing some).

Years ago when private repositories were still a paid feature on GitHub, you could use Bitbucket, which had them for free, and offered Git and Mercurial. A few years later Bitbucket announced they were removing Mercurial support because "Mercurial usage on Bitbucket is steadily declining, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial has fallen to less than 1%".

https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-b...

[Rinzler89]

>I don't see anyone choosing anything else for their pet project large or small either.

I also don't see anyone else choosing to breathing anything else than oxygen either. It's not like they have so many other options when the job market requires git and most coding tutorials also feature git and schools also use git, so the entire industry decided to use git despite other options existing.

Again, that doesn't mean git is bad or that is loved by everyone or that it's the best. Betamax also lost to VHS despite being technically superior. A lot of victories are won by the lesser product given enough inertia and being at the right time and the right place. Kind of how Windows and SAP got entrenched in the 90s. People and orgs were buying into it because everyone else was also using it so your only choice was to use it too no matter your own opinions on it. What were you gonna do? Piss against the wind and torpedo your hiring prospects by pigeonholing is some other "better" tool that nobody else uses?

I don't remember what VCS I used at my first job in the embedded industry but that one was hands down way better, easier and fool proof compared to git, with a nice GUI long before GIT GUI tools were even remotely good, it just didn't survive there long term because it costed a fuck tonne of money in licensing fees for the org. You can see where this is going, right? When it comes to bean counters, free beats paid every day regardless of most other arguments.

[zvrba]

Also smoking was once both popular and everywhere. At least smokers enjoy it, I'm not sure anyone "enjoys" using git.

[tinyhitman]

I'm sure I do.