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by eternityforest 440 days ago
I just wish they'd extend git to have better binary file diffs and moved file tracking.

Remembering the real history matters, because preserving history is valuable by itself, but I'm also really glad that VCS is for most people completely solved, there's nothing besides Git you have to pay attention to, you learn it once and use it your whole career.
2 comments
Izkata 440 days ago
> I just wish they'd extend git to have better binary file diffs

It's not built-in to git itself, but I remember seeing demos where git could be configured to use an external tool to do a visual diff any time git tried to show a diff of image files.

> and moved file tracking.

Check out -C and -M in the help for git log and blame. Git's move tracking is a bit weirder than others (it reconstructs moves/copies from history rather than recording them at commit), but I've found it more powerful than others because you don't need to remember a special "move" or "copy" command, plus it can track combining two files in a way others can't.

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g-b-r 440 days ago
It demonstrably can't detect all moves, Torvalds' theory that you didn't need moves tracking was bulls*it.
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g-b-r 440 days ago
> but I'm also really glad that VCS is for most people completely solved, there's nothing besides Git you have to pay attention to, you learn it once and use it your whole career.

From what I hear most current new developers never really learn git, they learn a couple features of some git GUI.

And it's understandable, you're really understating what learning git (one of the messiest and worst documented pieces of software ever) well entails.

I find it a disgrace that we're stuck at git, actually.

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eternityforest 439 days ago
That definitely describes me. I can use the Git CLI if needed, because the Git Book exists, but I almost never need to.

If I had to actually use git on the CLI every day, I would probably complain a lot, but it's a pretty good experience when you're using Git Cola and GitHub.

It would be nice if it had native discussions, issues, and wikis, like Fossil does, having that all, decentralized seems like a good idea though.

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