If Version Control Systems were Airlines
changelog.complete.org
changelog.complete.org
Here's an alternative: http://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue45/orr.html
(The punchline to the Linux airline is priceless, I think.)
Edit: If you like this sort of humor, Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has a great extended analogy where operating systems are car dealerships. A link and a snippet:
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
After they RTFM for how to start it. Attempting to drive away without that may result in seemingly random explosions.
That, and the consensus for anyone not in the consensus is that they should go fork themselves. The forked ones frequently agree.
In it's most basic pattern of use, it's not more complicated than subversion, but of course, then you are not using the majority of the features that make git so nice to work with and that help improve the quality of your code base.
But even if you are using this additional features (rebase -i, add -p, bisect), it's not hard to use and for sure it's never acting in unexpected ways.
Sometimes, the opinion about git feels like all the people saying that PostgreSQL is hard to use and slow. Can't people get over paradigms of the past?
I lived and worked in days when git was hard and PostgreSQL slow. Didn't stop me to see the change happen and to begin using them. Why can't others see and don't stop retelling the same old and obsolete stories over and over, be it in an earnest of funny (like this one here) package.
(disclaimer: I'm in a really bad mood today and I don't know why. I don't want to troll. I'm just bitter)
Want to switch to a different branch (or tag/revision hash)? 'git checkout'
Want to change a single file's contents to a previous version? 'git checkout'
Want to create a new branch? 'git checkout'
This becomes a problem because 'git checkout' has to have many different options to be able to do all of these things and all of these options can interact in different ways.
This makes the 'git help' for every command enormous because it needs to document the interaction between all the different options. Large help docs are hard to read when you're in the middle of working and just want to know how to do something specific.
Contrast git's help with Mercurial's equivalent helps:
$ git help checkout | wc -l
236
$ (hg help update ; hg help branch ; hg help revert) | wc -l
100
This is why I hate git's UI. There's so much functionality crammed into every command that the docs for each command become impossible to scan (try 'git help log | wc -l' for laughs).
The "create a new branch" functionality doesn't really belong in your list, since branches are created with "git branch". The -b switch is provided for checkout because _updating the working copy_ and creating a new branch is a very common sequence.
To be honest, I have yet to find anything I particularly dislike about git's approach. For some things, it took a while to see why it is the way it is, but in the end I find it fairly sensible. In my opinion, git just does things right on a fundamental level[1], which I find more important than UI issues.
[1] Compared to hg, especially the 'a branch is just a pointer' approach. I know of the bookmarks extension for hg but in the end I just used hg-to-git for the one hg repository that I follow.
The problem is that "update the working copy" isn't accurate.
When you 'git checkout my-feature-branch' you "update the working copy" AND "switch the current branch to my-feature-branch".
When you 'git checkout fa230bc -b new-branch' you "update the working copy" AND "create a new branch".
> The "create a new branch" functionality doesn't really belong in your list, since branches are created with "git branch". The -b switch is provided for checkout because _updating the working copy_ and creating a new branch is a very common sequence.
It absolutely does belong in the list. The problem is not simply that 'git checkout' can do a lot -- it's that the documentation is very hard to scan because it can do a lot. Adding the -b switch adds to the problem because now you have to mention how this option interacts with the others (and give examples of how to use it in the Examples section).
Sure, if I want to create a new branch at a specific revision then the -b switch saves me a few keystrokes -- but it also makes the documentation for 'git checkout' harder to quickly find what I'm looking for whenever I want to look up something, even if it's completely unrelated to branch creation.
You still get the blazing speed.
"Magical" indeed, precious. They wants their code in the trunk, doesn't they, yes they do. Stupid, fat, filthy geekits, they want to ruin the precious! We must stop them, we must.
though sometimes they secretly wonder if the Mercurial flight got there faster
I think that this airline thingy is the kick in the ass that I needed to finally at least try Mercurial. I hate git since the beginning but felt like "I had to use it".
Try to google 'hate ClearCase', alas, it's not that bad. Just expensive as hell, requires iron to run the reservation system of a major car rental company and a couple dozen adminsitrators to keep it running. This is not much of an exaggeration.
This resulted in a lot of customers complaining about the speed of the journey but since its control is under singular management, change has been slow. There is frequent time lag of messages between the control tower and the airplane though this does not seem to affect the dependability of the flight. Its usually considered more reliable than the Sourcesafe airline where the communication loss between the tower and the airline results in an immediate stall.
ClearCase flies aircraft that resemble battleships being brought aloft by 25,000 parakeets, all of whom are weighed down by 25,000 pages of documentation, which none of them have ever read.