|
> Literally every one of those questions can be trivially googled. (In previous generations and fora, this is where you'd be mocked with LMGTFY links). You just, to continue to embrace the frame, don't want to do the work. I find this an odd statement. I mean, no, I don't want to do the work! Not if it isn't necessary in the first place. Take staging (or the index, because another of Git's foibles is poor naming conventions that stick around and confuse newcomers). It's kind of a commit, right? In the sense that it's a snapshot of work that represents a change to the code. Except we can't really make it behave like a commit, we have to interact with it using special commands until we turn it into a commit. Are these special commands really doing much differently than we might do with another commit? Not really. Or take stashes. Stashes are more like commits — they even appear in the reflog! But they also aren't real commits either, in the sense that you can't check them out, or rebase them, or manipulate them directly. Again, you need a bunch of extra commands for working with the stash, when really they're just free-standing anonymous commits. Or take branches. Branches are, as everyone knows, pointers to commits. So why is it important whether I'm checking out a branch or a commit? Why is one of these normal, but the other produces hideous warnings and looks like it loses me data if I haven't learned what a reflog is yet? And if a branch is just a pointer, why can't I move it around freely? I can push it forwards, but I can't move it to another arbitrary commit without fiddling around a lot. Why? Or take tags, which are like branches, but they don't move. Is "moves" and "doesn't move" such a deeply important distinction that Git needs branches and two different kinds of tag? --- To be clear, I think Git is a good tool, and I agree that once you've started to familiarise yourself with it, it's not so complicated in day-to-day usage. Yes, you'll probably need to Google a few specific commands every so often, but the general UX of the tool has significantly improved since the early days, and it is getting better. That said, I also don't like the idea of settling with Git just because it's good. If there are alternatives out there that can do everything that Git can do, but with a simpler conceptual model, then I want to try them! (And, spoiler alert, I think there are better alternatives out there — in particular, I think Jujutsu is just as powerful as Git, if not more so, while simplifying and removing unnecessarily duplicated concepts.) |
They are real commits, you can check them out (it detaches your HEAD, the syntax to reference them is `stash{N}`). Although I think this furthers, rather than undermining, your point that there are an unnecessary number of other commands to work with the stash.
I think this is a failure of the git CLI as much as the internal data-structures. I think the idea of a commit tree is very good and a lot of people recognize that. The commands that git exposes to work with that tree can sometimes be miserable.