Git is great but if you really haven't found any reasons then you haven't looked at all. From large files to sub modules to hook permissions and file permissions... The list goes on and on about what where git falls short.
There's plenty of workarounds too, but that's what they are. Workarounds.
jj does not have large file or submodule support, but it does intend to in the future (you can read their design docs). Right now it's git compatible, so I'm not sure how 'permissions' would be stored compatibly, or what that means. I'm guessing ownership and xattrs
2. rebase based merge strategies - our team has 50+ devs across three continents merging into monorepo with teams maintaining submodules. By the time your merge request passes CI it has to be rebased. People are literally holding off on reviewing merge requests to make sure their own changes get in first
3. permissions for subdirectories/assets. some necessary code/modules are highly regulated and company secrets. Git cant lock certain directories based on who clones the repo
4. Agentic coding - if you don't commit then your changeset after each request is lost. JJ solves this. You could just say to commit after every request then squash the commits. But, I think this is an ergonomic argument
5. Maybe it's just my experience, but git-lfs is pretty annoying to manage on large teams and changing files to/from lfs. often easier to just delete and clone again
6. git blame on non-meaninful changes. Running a code linter to add/remove whitespace makes git blame return who ran the linter rather than who wrote the code
7. self-reported identity. every time we get new laptops (because they buy the cheapest POS) devs forget what they set for 'username'. so it ends up being 3-4 different identities with the same email
to be fair, #2 exists because monorepos and submodules are somewhat antithetical concepts. A monorepo is supposed tobe the single source of truth for the codebase, while submodules are pointers to external repos with their own history. That alone will increase the source of churn for teams that are constantly merging.
2. That has the smells of a wrong code architecture. If change request leads to unneeded code conflicts, you need to rework your code architecture.
3. That’s valid, but why not create libraries out of those modules?
4. Valid. But I think the issue is on the agent side. Git has already all the features to make those happen, it’s the agent that is not integrated with git.
5…
6. Either than sweeping changes (adding a formatter, changing config,…) There’s no need for formatting changes to be its own commit in the main repo. I usually add a check to prevent inconsistent formatting.
7. The git history has the previous username and email recorded alongside each commit.
1. Ease of use. Other VCS have more consistent command line interfaces; Git's interface has to be studied. In practice, people end up using GUIs with missing functionality and then end up searching for help, and a lot of real experts come to rely on powerful wrappers like Magit, LazyGit, or JJ.
(Compare to Mercurial, Fossil or Git; those systems have consistent and usable interfaces. There's much less demand for wrappers or LLM tooling since they're easy to use already.)
2. Preservation of history. Two common commands - git rebate and git push -f - cause commit history to be lost, sometimes permanently. ("Just be careful" and "Just don't use those commands" are useful pieces of advice for an individual, and virtually impossible to enforce over groups.)
3. Conflict resolution. Git forces the user to resolve conflicts ASAP so we often lose information about A. What the conflict exactly was, and B. How the individual resolved it. Most VCS have this issue; JJ allows you to commit the conflict and solve it in a separate commit, which is nice.
1. Usually people have no mental model about versioning other than “draft-1, draft-final, final, final2, final-final,…’. Because they don’t care about requirements and design decisions documentation, auditing changes, and release management. Git provides a set of tools for solving those. Wrappers are for when you have your own workflow for those needs and have a good understanding of git.
3. The goal of writing code is to have working software. Conflict messages are like compiler warnings, better have them than getting errors slipping by unnoticed. If A conflict with B, the root cause is often a design conflict, which means that the design of the software is inconsistent.
The conflict only matters as long as it’s not been solved. For each commit, the design of the software need to be consistent, and the succession of commit describe the evolution of the design. A is not lost, B is not lost in the case of a merge and may stay for a long time when rebasing. C which solves the difference between A and B (and may replace B) is also consistent. I don’t care about inconsistency.