Man, they use Git and you complain? I've collaborated with pretty brilliant PhDs[1] who would say "Subversion is so complicated, can't we just use Dropbox?"
[1] Insult to injury: computer science, not physics.
[1] Insult to injury: computer science, not physics.
Not a joke: courses supposed to teach programming are organized with Dropbox and email attachments.
Time and again, new services have come out, for decades, that supposedly will help solve the versioning, collaboration, and reproducibility issues with academic papers.
They never work, and the tools are always misused in this same way: as a catch-all bucket for disparate and unrelated snapshots of the paper, the code, and the data.
Merely moving from manual versioning in Dropbox to manual versioning in git is not in the least bit to be considered progress. We have to absolutely curb the underlying problematic behavior (e.g. this repo has but a single commit, the concept of version doesn't even apply) before it counts as even the tiniest step in the right direction.
In fact, I see it as a huge problem that people are chiming in to say that using git is in and of itself some kind of positive step. Why?
I don't care if you use svn, darcs, mercurial, git, perforce, or any other versioning system. The fundamental issue is actually keeping track of the changes you've made, and ensuring the precise version used for publication is trackable and available.
Even using Dropbox with clear documentation of changes made would be better than using a git repo where, prior to your first commit, you have destroyed all version history information and manually put everything into the "good" commit that you feel like "showing" to everyone.
That behavior is the entire problem. Using git, in and of itself, doesn't represent any degree of departure from the old practices. Just because git is popular and new-ish and sexy doesn't mean simply dropping stuff in a git repo constitutes progress. That's a dangerous implication.