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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I've been using git at work for a couple of years and I haven't spent very much time thinking about the internals at all. It just seems to work pretty much, though sometimes I get into a weird state and just delete and redownload.

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That's the thing, there is almost no reason to ever have to delete and redownload. Moreover, the reason that git is dominant is (network effects, and) because it is solving the right problem with the right internal abstractions. It has even managed to become popular in spite of its user interface.

Yeah usually there's a way I can figure it out but if it takes more than 15 seconds it's easier to just clone the repo again.

There is a reason to re-clone. It fixes every weird git state. And you don't even need to learn a bunch of theory to do it.

We are all ignorant in most respects; there is an opportunity cost in knowing anything. If you use git daily, I submit that it does not make sense to be ignorant of how it works. Yes, you will take no physical harm from misusing this tool, but you're setting yourself up for failure. Reading about how git works will prevent you from making the mistakes that lead to an unworkable state, and allow you to resolve any unexpected situations or errant keystrokes. To make something of an analogy, git has the most powerful and flexible form of "undo" that has been conceived to date, and you are discarding this because you can always re-download an old copy and redo your work. If it is something that you use only rarely, there is nothing wrong with choosing to study other things. If you are employed as a software developer then I would consider you to have very little excuse for ignorance.

I have never had to resort to this technique. However, there's a lot in git I don't understand. I've spent multiple days learning git, and at some point, the diminishing returns of further investment don't justify themselves. If I broke my repo in such a way that caused me to consider re-cloning to "get out of jail", I probably would only do it if I didn't lose a significant amount of work. (e.g. copy in-progress files to a safe location before recloning)

You say I have very little excuse for my ignorance, but I would also say that I have very little excuse to spend any more time learning a tool with as many dark corners as git.

You should never have to redownload unless somebody is carelessly force oushing changes to the remote.

If you're about to do something 'weird' like fix a merge conflict, you can save the changes by creating a branch.

Sometimes you have to go back and fix a previous commit to reconcile a conflict. The 'gitk --all' command is your friend here. With it it's easy to visualize the history, reset, cherry-pick commits, etc.

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