Some bad Git situations and how I got myself out of them
ohshitgit.com
ohshitgit.com
I understand that people need to know how to use their tools, but for git most people can get away with the very basic usage that GUIs provide. If you've made some unrecoverable mistake with an important set of changes, you can always review the history in the same GUI and reimplement the important changes in a new branch.
I use magit myself for most things.
I mainly use the GUI for day-to-day stuff. Only in rare cases will I need to mess with the command line.
I love this tool -- it's honestly one of the best graphical tools I've ever used -- rock solid reliable -- intuitive, not leaky in the abstractions it represents -- and not limited to only "simple" operations. And with the graphical reflog history rollback view -- it's always really easy to back up however far you want if you mess up which gives great confidence as you explore the ui's features. Ive taken designers from "never used git" to confidently pushing, pulling, rebasing, and resolving conflicts in less than a day (and most of it after the first 10 minutes without outside help).
Clicking on a commit and pressing space brings up a view showing a github-style diff, a list of all changed files, and the complete commit message. Nice.
Thanks for the tip!
I had to do a site visit with a customer recently and spent some time pair programming on their codebase -- on a Windows machine and they used an awful git client -- really reminded me how much I appreciate using gitup!
Seems like there's a glut of these apps of late—not that I'm complaining! :-)
I used to use a GUI for git, but now I just find them cumbersome; by their nature requiring me to switch window for less.
Honestly I'm not aware of any common repo tasks that I could more efficiently complete via the command line vs gitup. There are good keyboard shortcuts for everything in gitup so most everything I do doesn't even involve the mouse.
Also -- I'm the kind of person who's always got a set of terminal windows open and definitely uses them often (almost never use Finder, hate taking my hands off the keyboard to reach for the trackpad). At this point -- I never reach for the git cli over gitup (except when cloning a new repo).
I'm using mac at the moment, and the awful window management (and inability to properly change it - all wm apps just handle resizing and moving within existing spaces and margins) just makes me more motivated to do everything in full-screen tmux, to simulate a decent wm - as long as everything is CLI-based!
(I tried Arch on it for a while, but ended up deciding the firmware difficulties - in particular the battery draining quickly and CPU running hotter - weren't worth it; I traded i3 for full-screened tmux.)
git is basically a brilliant repo model combined with an insane cli. gitup is the brilliant ui that the repo model deserves.
bonus awesome thing about gitup: it monitors the filesystem and updates its state in realtime, so it it's seemless to mix your workflow between cli and gui.
Every one of the tasks in the article is a simple, straightforward operation in SmartGit. Take "I accidentally committed something to master that should have been on a brand new branch!" or "I accidentally committed to the wrong branch!" for example.
Instead of an obscure series of four to six commands, you simply go to SmartGit's log view and drag the branch markers to where you want them. Easy and intuitive.
I know GUI tools are a hard sell for a lot of programmers. I honestly don't understand why. I think it may be the fear that you'd be giving up power, but SmartGit isn't a dumbed-down GUI. It gives you a more powerful set of tools, and much more visibility into the state of your repo.
You're not even giving anything up. You can still use the command line whenever you want, and SmartGit shows you the commands it used to accomplish each task.
Of course you still need to understand the underlying Git concepts to use any GUI effectively, but a tool like SmartGit lets you see those concepts.
Disclaimer: I'm now a GitLab authorized training partner and reseller. The community edition is free. :)
I always use git on the command line. Regarding GUI tools I like to avoid them, for me is too much noise. People get lost most of the time because they don't know what the tool is doing. After all is just one more layer on top of git core tool per se (aka, what you have in command line).
If you're used to the commands from the keyboard, where you're likely already typing from your editor...can't imagine going back to the GUI.
No thanks.
# Make correcting change
git commit --all --fixup=<ref of commit with mistake>
# Continue working on branch, then at some point
git rebase --interactive --autosquash
Handy enough that I set rebase.autoSquash to true in my ~/.gitconfig so 'git rebase -i' always works like this.
Yeah, true. I posted it mostly because one of the bigger threads of comments was advocating using a GUI instead of the CLI. I'm not going to argue that the git CLI is simple, but it does have some nice features to support specific common workflows.
last_commit=$(git log --oneline | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f1)
git commit -a --fixup ${last_commit}
GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR=true git rebase -i --autosquash ${last_commit}~1I would like to understand what's the yearly damage of such an important tool being so difficult to use. People committing the wrong stuff, unmergeable messes, people not being able to correct their mistakes, there must be thousands of Git rookies fucking up their Git repo or throwing away their work just as I am writing this.
What would be the cost? Millions of Dollars? Perhaps even billions?
It's about as bad as 0 being a legit value for a regular pointer.
Mercurial has a clean and simple UI, especially if you come from a SVN background.
But Git's internals are simpler and the concept is much easier to understand, especially if you start looking at a handful of the most popular Mercurial extensions, some of which will be "must have" sooner or later.
This is no excuse for an inconsistent UI in Git, but the damage is already done. There's no point in making major changes now (some renaming for consistency might be alright, though), it would be breaking existing workflows and scripts.
I find the best explanation of how Git works is... the first commit of Git[0] itself.
[0] https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...
There are A LOT of mercurial users which are big companies, they just aren't so vocal on the internal like people using GIT. Mercurial has an established community, great plugability system, an awesome feature like phases.
We see more and more people adopting Mercurial together with our product.
I wish to see more advocates of Mercurial, it's a shame it doesn't get more public attention nowadays.
I'm only an occasional Git user, but am a heavy Mercurial user.
I have never needed to understand Mercurial's internals.
Are you suggesting a Git user will eventually need to understand it? That's a strike against Git already.
From my observation over the years, people who use Git get "stuck" more often, because they are trying to leverage the extra power Git seems to provide. With Mercurial, you often can do similar powerful stuff, but they make sure you have to go through hoops to do it. As such, unsuspecting non-power users do not shoot themselves in the foot.
The typical advice -- which you'll see in this thread and elsewhere -- is that anyone who uses git should learn git's internals, and preferably up-front, since apparently that will magically cause git to make sense.
I'm a bit put off by the idea, myself.
It's also worth looking at git internals because it's very elegant, clean and simple. In my opinion, one of the best designed software systems I've come across.
I encourage you to look at the README in the first git commit, it's very enlightening.
I try to learn about git internals just for the pleasure of it.
I think as engineers we should understand how our tools work.
$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/eigen/eigen/
$ cd eigen
$ time hg grep CUDA > /dev/null
real 0m16.661s
user 0m16.097s
sys 0m0.531s
$ git clone https://github.com/RLovelett/eigen.git
$ cd eigen
$ time git grep CUDA > /dev/null
real 0m0.019s
user 0m0.035s
sys 0m0.057s
I do agree that reproducible differences in performance should be measured, not single tests.
First of all, if I just cloned the repos, they should be in disk cache. My machine has 64GB of RAM.
Second of all, if they're not in disk cache, what on earth is hg doing that it takes 16 seconds to read them all in? Eigen is not that big, and I have a fast SSD.
Third of all, you can run the tests yourself -- I gave you the exact commands to try. "I tried it and my results are X" is a much better contribution to the discussion.
Fourth of all, yes, I ran the benchmarks multiple times in a row to check whether disk cache was at play. It was not. :)
Sorry, the speedup was very great so it almost seemed like something else was causing it. Thanks for the benchmarks.
> Third of all, you can run the tests yourself -- I gave you the exact commands to try. "I tried it and my results are X" is a much better contribution to the discussion.
That's true; I'm lazy.
Actually, I was thinking more of the disk cache of loading hg, not the repo (Python programs tend to have a great speedup through the disk cache).
(End Sarcasm).
Seriously? You're so productive that the cost of cloning a repository is a major impediment?
The benefits of a cleaner interface mostly trump the benefits of speed.
Read the commands more carefully. It is not the cost of cloning the repository, but rather the cost of searching it.
16s is not a big deal, but I'm assuming it would get much worse for larger repositories.
Personally, my searches are either:
1. Restricted to all files that end in cpp, h, py, pl, etc.
2. Explicitly exclude .hg directories.
I'll confess: I use a nice tool to do my searches than typing it out in grep. Much handier. And it remembers previously used filters (.cpp,.h) and is usually the first item in the drop down box. Much quicker than typing out a grep command.
Still, I feel if our team used git instead of hg, we'd lose a lot more time due to people not grokking git and making mistakes than the time lost in longer searches.
My point still stands: Things like search time are not a productivity bottleneck. If all our searches were 100x faster, there would be no difference in our output.
And I disagree with this point:
Things like search time are *not* a productivity bottleneck.
Not having looked at the internals of either, I wonder if this is related to other performance differences in grep implementations across *nix systems.
EDIT: Exploring this, it seems they don't do the same thing? `git grep` searches, by default, only the most recent working tree or revision. It doesn't search every revision unless you tell it to. `hg grep` (don't have it installed) seems to search every revision by default, so restricting it to the current revision requires an explicit command line option specifying the revision range to search.
Things like search time are *not* a productivity bottleneck.
I happen to know that git grep is very carefully optimized. Someone cared a lot about making it run fast. Seems like a good guess that they did so because it was important to them or someone else, not just for funzies.
$ grep '^git grep' ~/.bash_history | wc -l
407
$ grep -w '^ls' ~/.bash_history | wc -l
37
$ wc -l ~/.bash_history
19421
What's interesting here is that it's the exact thing happening. Someone asked about how much hidden cost there is from the time people waste fighting to make git do what they need it to do, and it got derailed with a discussion of how `git grep` is faster than `hg` grep`.
I'm sure it's great for you that git's grep is fast. But the time you gain from how much faster it is than hg probably is strongly outweighed by the time other people lose to struggling with git's interface. Unfortunately there's no easy way to benchmark that.
I appreciate that - I know the frustration of tools being a bit laggy.
However, I think you are falling for the [Endowment Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect). You are accustomed to it, so the alternative seems horrible without you really thinking it through. If you were not already using grep, the search issue would not be a big deal.
I already pointed out how merely excluding ".hg" from your search will save all the time, and this benefit you speak of disappears (please correct me if I'm wrong).
On my shell, that's as simple as creating an alias for grep to always exclude ".hg".
Yes, I'll grant that searching Mercurial repositories is a lot slower. But you need to understand that the obvious solution is not "Switch to git". There are simpler solutions.
In that sense, this seems to be a very insignificant benefit of git, even for people like you who need to search often.
To beat a dead horse, if you had two developers: One using git and the other using mercurial, and both need to search heavily, the mercurial person will likely have already solved the problem in one way or another. It'd be a bit silly for an observer to look at them and say "Ah, Git is so much better because it did not require a shell alias for faster searches!"
$ time taskset -c 2 hg grep CUDA >/dev/null
taskset -c 2 hg grep CUDA > /dev/null 25.04s user 0.46s system 99% cpu 25.514 total
$ time taskset -c 2 sh -c 'git grep --cached -l CUDA | xargs -n 1 git blame >/dev/null'
taskset -c 2 sh -c 4.85s user 0.13s system 97% cpu 5.097 totalWhy? When I do hg grep, it doesn't show me blame or anything; the output looks almost identical to the output of git grep. If it's doing work and then throwing it away, why is it fair to force git to do the same work and then also throw it away?
(I'll also point out that git is still 5x faster in this comparison. :)
* Network effect. Almost any dev can use git, so it's our "common language". * Staging area. Mercurial doesn't have one, which I find is enough to make me never look back.
$ time hg grep --rev tip CUDA > /dev/null
real 0m0.075s
user 0m0.055s
sys 0m0.020s
The problem, that I don't think anybody even expected, is that there are strong network effects on the selection of your CVS. That gives the tool that can handle more use cases a big advantage, and bigger still if those features are needed on the projects with more developers.
Non-distributed VCS clearly don't cut it for many use cases, and of the other DVCS I've tried, none were really better than Git in my opinion.
Sure, it depends on your workflow. But if part of your workflow is authoring sequences of commits that make sense in hindsight, then I honestly haven't seen an alternative.
The point of Git is that it gets the underlying data model right, and just exposes that. Once you grok that, it is superior to everything else.
If you don't grok it, you have a problem. For this reason, I think GUIs are actually somewhat detrimental for Git use. git gui and gitk serve a purpose, and they could definitely need some polish, but my other explorations into Git GUIs have basically turned out to be badly done and leaky abstractions which hurt more than they help.
(Not to mention the fact that Perforce as I know it simply doesn't cover the distributed use cases that Git does. Obviously adding distributed features makes any VCS more complex, but that is the inherent complexity of the problem space as opposed to artificial complexity. If your problem is conceptually easier, you can make the solution appear easier.)
Certainly, it's got a lot of different switches and stuff, but since its data model is so simple, you can always understand what it's doing to your data. So you can read a description of what a switch does, and then understand exactly what will happen when you use it.
(The exception to this is automatic merge conflict resolution with rerere, which is just magic to me. But it's a bonus feature anyway)
For me, as a long time git user, git's UI and UX is approximately a bajillion times better than something like SVN, which can barely even do half the things that I use every day in git.
Maybe I haven't just dug deep enough into Subversion's manual, but can you tell me how to do the equivalent of "git log -p"? Last time I checked (SVN 1.8) that's not very trivial. Or how to revert a commit? IIRC that requires a merge.
So at least compared to subversion, git enables a workflow that was previously too much work, and gives me a better tool for working with version-controlled text data.
Mercurial is another thing I find puzzling, and I'm honestly interested why it is that people find it so much easier to use than git. I'm so used to working with throw-away branches that hg's default branching model just feels needlessly difficult to me, and good support for managing branches is the most important feature of a VCS, since any change you ever make is automatically a branch from the base. In git, this feels natural, since branches are a feature of the underlying data model, not something treated specially.
svn log --diff, added in 1.9. Also doable with a little (est. < 10 lines) of shell scripting.
> Or how to revert a commit? IIRC that requires a merge.
git and svn disagree on whether history should be permanent or not.
I'm still at uni (at a highly ranked but actually crap university where we don't learn git properly) and this year was my 'year in industry' as we call it in the UK, and my first proper experience with git, aside from `git init` at the end of my project and pushing it to a repo.
I've become so much more confident with git. Seriously, with one caveat (i.e., you haven't pushed your changes to a branch which other developers are working on), it is almost impossible to break irrevocably. Even if you do accidentally break master/develop/whatever, it only causes a bit of hassle and grumbling.
Highly recommend that everyone take a bit of time to learn about "undoing" git commands, whether that's through soft resets, hard resets to origin, or the reflog.
Reflog is also useful for figuring out how someone else broke something and explaining what they did wrong, since you can see what branch they were on at what commit and what commands they ran.
I think git's main problem is the somewhat arcane language it uses, and lack of understanding of what's actually happening behind those words like "rebase", "commit", "patch", "reset" etc.
This tells me you still don't get the point about using a revision control system: the whole point is NOT that you can hack the revision control system's database every which way, but that you can never, as in ever, break something in a repository, because you can always revert the previous commit and do a new commit of that revert. Keeping it simple since January 1st, 1970.
It's called the "unceremonious revert", popularized by Jeff Bonwick, the father of ZFS and former Solaris gatekeeper, in the "Quality death spiral":
Bonwick was granted authority to "rip it out if itʼs broken" — an early BDFL model, and a template for later generations of engineering leadership.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091028095830/http://hub.openso...
https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Community+History
SEE ALSO
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2015/09/03/software-immaculate-f...
...and do youserlf a favor, try out Bitkeeper (it's open source!) before you get completely absorbed into git. You might never be able to get out of that tar pit afterwards, or it might be decades before you realize it. Who will compensate you for all that lost time, and how would you be compensated?
@mathieuh was only referring to not being able to break the something in the repo, He didn't mention hacking the git or the git data structure.
Also, @mathieuh is a uni student, so comments like
> This tells me you still don't get the point about using a revision control system
Can come across a little unnice.
See also 'svn obliterate'.
But not how to use the tool.
a) Explain the value of version control and actively promote its usage
b) Drop some hints on which good version control systems are out there, one of which is git, then let students pick, learn and run with their own choice
It'd take all of half an hour, with great benefits for students.
We were told to version control a group project, but all we were given was an SVN repo and told "if anything goes wrong, email this address".
Personally I would expect tuition through the use of a tool, that tool doesn't have to be git, it just so happens to be the tool I've had the most exposure to.
What this does is check what's on the remote branch and compare it with what you think is on the remote branch, and only do the force if they're the same thing. So if someone pushes a commit, the force push errors out instead of silently overwriting it.
Basically every single time you want to force push, you probably should be doing a `--force-with-lease` instead. I can't think of a situation where you'd want to silently lose commits you don't know about rather than get an error.
By my reckoning, rewriting history just isn't a reasonable decision in shared branches.
git revert <bad commit>
git push
Simple, completely linear history for origin/master is just so powerful in many that aspects that I'm constantly baffled why merging seems to be the flow mostly being talked about.
Now someone usually comes and says that merges are superior for long running branches. Which may be true in some aspects, but when you have more than one "running" branch and you got to try and find which commits have the code changes that only together seem to break and this is after 2 non-trivial merge commits, you really start to wish you'd gone with rebase.
I'm not sure why you think this is worse to coordinate than merge commits? I think encouraging rebase-heavy workflow where feature branches are put into origin/master as often as possible actually improves the coordination quite a lot. When working that way, origin/master is always pretty recent, and anyone starting a new feature branch from top of it has really small risk of missing any big change sets from coworkers. On the other hand, I feel that merge-heavy workflow encourages people to have long-running branches other than origin/master, which hides commits from others.
With multiple team members (each on their own feature branch), I encourage what I call the "pitchfork" approach [1], where the feature branches get stacked up into an integration branch to preview what the master branch would ultimately be when all the feature branches are merged in via pull requests.
A key part of building and recreating the pitchfork structure is git rerere [2].
[0] http://matthew-brett.github.io/pydagogue/rebase_without_tear...
[1] https://gist.github.com/dkaminski/c8e59221bea74ab1fea615a468...
1) git-rerere is really cool, and can probably make things very convenient, especially if you do several rebase operations to stack your integration branch. Without git-rerere, I can't imagine this workflow being remotely sane (resolving the same conflict every time you try to add an additional commit on one of the branches would get old fast).
2) This approach could probably help in "merging" (not git-merge, but you know) several feature branches with lots of conflicts, but does sort of rely on "As long as you make clean commits on the correct feature branches". While it's a laudable goal, how often can this really be the case, especially in projects where contributors are not composed of a single, core team (i.e. open source or research based projects)? I would think that ensuring clean commits is hard enough without a fixed team, so I am genuinely curious how hard it is to enforce this assumption.
See, here's the thing -> integration like this seems to work really well, especially if you're sharing branches across the repository with several teammates / coworkers. But what if you're not sharing branches? In the example you provided at [1], you have three branches: A, B, and C. Because you have access to all branches, it's easy to make an integration branch that does master -> Ai -> Bi -> Ci, and to handle all the conflicts with rerere. Then as A, B, C evolve and more commits are pushed, you could even have a build-bot of some sort assist in rebuilding the integration branch and checking for significant conflicts or errors. Of course, this all works great, but git is distributed.
What that means in practice is you may have master and branch A on your machine, and your two coworkers might have B and C on their machines, but none of you have rights to push these branches to the main repository location. This is common in BDFL-type projects, where one person or a handful of people are the only ones capable of pushing branches to the main repo. If your organization is split up like this, and individual developers tend to work on fixing single issues at a time, then you really never get the opportunity to use the integration branches, since you're only ever integrating your own (single) branch! If there's a bottleneck on upstream whatsoever, then the difference between this model and merging isn't really apparent, as you're not really getting any benefit either way (rebase -i non-withstanding). It would seem this would just kick the can down the road for the next developer to rebase off of the new master (with A rebased/merged in) and then solve their problems locally. This could be a significant duplication of effort if handled poorly.
I suppose you could have an intermediate "integration" repo where everyone pushes their branches, and build this sort of setup in assistance with some sort of CI, but I wonder how that scales if you have > 20 issue branches. The reason I ask this is because in the pitchfork workflow, how do you know which branch gets integrated first, second, etc.? I'm sure there's somewhat of a natural ordering in practice, as some issues or features probably take priority over others for some reason or another, but what if you don't know? What's the best way to keep the history? Certainly history isn't everything, but you may want to bisect down the road and A -> B -> C may cause more problems than B -> C -> A (you might not know at this point in time). Furthermore, do you not need someone / several people working together to resolve these conflicts? Is it sane to keep bothering your coworkers with "hey I just made a new integration branch, what do I do about conflict X", while they're still pushing new commits to B or C?
I think the pitchfork strategy for rebasing onto master is intriguing, and I'd have to play with it for an extended period of time to really get answers to some of these questions. Unfortunately, it seems that the bottleneck issue isn't something that can be easily solved for most projects. I don't come across many projects that allow every contributor to push branches, especially if they allow for pull-requests of any kind (even for one-off contributions). Nonetheless, I've definitely learned something here, and I think I understand better why one might want to rebase instead of merge. Then again, pull-requests are very heavily tied to merge-based flows, and if the project I'm contributing to wants to use them, then I'm probably hooped to begin with. Git is great for letting teams decide how they want to work, but it can be very painful if even one contribution doesn't follow guidelines (both to break a consistent history / commit graph, as well as if you ever have to git-bisect over it).
[1] https://gist.github.com/dkaminski/c8e59221bea74ab1fea615a468...
But does anyone know why this project has two homes?
Also, I think everyone should go through Neo's Git Immersion at some point early in their experience with git. It is the best crash course by far.
git tag tmp
git perform-stunt
And to be aware what happens, there one single explanation of git that helps a lot: http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/
As soon as you start viewing git as a graph of nodes with branches/tags just being "marked" nodes a lot of things make sense, and whatever "git perform-stunt" you attempt it's easy to explain within that mental model.
Other ways to do it (that don't require to retype the commit message): - rebase onto the correct branch:
git branch foo
git reset --hard HEAD~
git rebase --onto name-of-the-correct-branch HEAD foo
git checkout name-of-the-correct-branch
git merge foo
git branch -D foo
git reset --hard HEAD~
git checkout name-of-the-correct-branch
git cherry-pick name-of-the-branch-you-mistakenly-committed-to@{1} (or git cherry-pick HEAD@{2})
You probably want to know `git diff HEAD` too.
Edit: formatting.
git checkout -b actual-branch
git branch -f master origin/master git branch name-of-the-correct-branch
git reset --hard HEAD~
git checkout name-of-the-correct-branchThe thing is, some repositories on github require you to commit only after proper rebasing. But I can never in my life remember how and need to google it...
Been there too, with the same result.
> Any points on how to continue from there?
Honestly? Not always from the command-line, unfortunately. Basically, I just don't know the right commands to type on the command-line for everything I do with git, and it's not necessarily easy to find them either. I use the TortoiseGit GUI, and over there, it's a LOT more easy to see what is going on and to abort or continue rebases/merges as necessary, or to do fancier stuff. But the thing is, because I understand git and I know what should logically happen at every step, I can cherry-pick commits, revert them, abort/continue merges, rebase commits, or do whatever else the heck I want without getting into trouble anymore... even though I don't know how to do many of them on the command line.
Of course, it took a lot of suffering to get here. Starting with the GUI would of course be the wrong approach. But once you've understood what's going on, then I would recommend you entirely ditch the command line and switch to something like TortoiseGit (I hope you're either on Windows or your platform has something as good as that). The GUI actually shows you what your options are at every step, so you don't have to know all the valid commands at every possible state. You just need to know what effect you need to cause.
git merge --abort
git rebase --abort
Running it gives you a log of all the things `HEAD` has ever pointed at, meaning you can find what you had before a rebase and check that out.
git reflog
git checkout HEAD@{10}
People use rebase in a far too casual way. Rebasing is a pretty advanced use case, one that is unnecessary for normal git usage. You sentence sounds like: I stopped trusting Ford because the car stopped working when I reprogrammed the ECU.
In short: If you are not entirely comfortable with git's inner workings, do not use rebase. Do not complain if you shoot yourself the foot with rebase.
So that example should have been:
cd ..
mv fucking-git-repo-dir fucking-git-repo-dir.archived.$(date +%s)
git clone https://some.github.url/fucking-git-repo-dir.git git fetch origin master && git reset --hard origin/master
sudo rm -rf /some/path --no-preserve-rootFor example, the last "bad situation" I had to get myself out of involved unreadable .git contents caused by filesystem corruption. If you can "rm -rf fucking-git-repo-dir" then it's not too bad; when that fails with an IO error is when things get interesting!
> git reset HEAD~ --hard
What is ~ after HEAD? What is --hard? Is there a --deep option as well?
So I think that you could upgrade this with some annotations over the cryptic parts with a little explanation. What do you think?
That is I believe `git stash` should be removed from git as evil data loosing feature, not needed. Instead just make an alias `git save <TEMP_BRANCH_NAME>` which saves your temporary work to the branch:
`save = !sh -c 'export PREV=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD|cut -d/ -f3-) && git checkout -b "$1" && git commit -am "$1" && git checkout "$PREV"' -`
"Applying the state can fail with conflicts; in this case, it is not removed from the stash list. You need to resolve the conflicts by hand and call git stash drop manually afterwards."
Or do I misunderstand you?
If you don't then there are ry only two things you need to know how to do:
If you didn't push to origin do an ammend. If you did, revert soft and commit the previous code to revert it (you can also put a stash or patch to apply it back).
Which frankly is what the article does, basically.
Yes, that sounds as easy as anything that accepts the idea of "let's do this the shitty-but-quick way now, and pay the technical debt later". So yes, it is "easier" to work with in the beginning.
On the other hand, if I had to inherit your repository that was developed by "not caring about history", I would probably have to hunt you down and kill you. So there's that.
Yep. Some people just want to keep taking technical debt on (read: hack-it-'till-it-works), which makes them likely candidates for a good thrashing in some dark blind street in the middle of the night. And some don't even get it after that. Actually, now that you made me think about it, most people in this industry aren't really computer people material, that's the problem.
You need to expand on this because i don't quite understand what you mean, are you talking about "fix typo" commits or are we getting to the level of just committing away until things work and then not cleaning up the work later on? The linked article doesn't cover rebasing or squashing commits, which can be pretty powerful when used correctly.
Your commit log is the one thing that is immutably linked to your code changes. Your documentation isn't, the comments in your code aren't, you will forget why you made a change, anyone reviewing your logs needs to understand your intention, your bug tracker will probably change several times over the life of a project, and so on. So, make an effort to have a commit log that is clean and comprehensive and commits that don't break tests.
I go into this in more detail in a talk i gave last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OHAq8dCoS4
You get your cake and you can eat it too.
Be verbose in your commit messages and don't worry about merge commits, it will pay dividends later.
> Oh shit, I accidentally committed something to master that should have been on a brand new branch!
# disappear the last commit and all changes from it
git reset --hard HEAD^
# make a new branch using the last commit
git checkout -b new-branch HEAD@{1}
first, you don't need to git-add before and after stash, stash will save the working directory and the index (as documented in the DESCRIPTION of git-stash(1)). but for a more logical way:
# disappear the last commit and all changes from it
git reset --hard HEAD^
# get onto the new branch
git checkout new-branch
# grab the stuff from what was on the old branch
git cherry-pick old-branch@{1}
git diff --cached
git checkout new-branch
git cherry-pick old-branch
git checkout old-branch
git reset --hard HEAD^Shameless plug: http://engineering.hipolabs.com/how-to-work-in-a-team-versio...
Not all people who write software are full-time developers. Not all people who use git are developers at all, come to mention it. Not all people who use git for one thing use it for everything. Not everyone can justify the time required for a course for something that might be a tiny part of their work.
I think that's a tad judgemental for two reasons:
1- because git is legitimately hard to learn. Personally I suspect git is unnecessarily hard to learn, that command names and the concepts and workflows I need are possible to learn and use with less effort. For many years people around me have been asking for git help because I know how to recover from lost stashes and use the reflog, etc., and yet I still have to google the magic incantations for commands I use regularly because they're impossible to remember.
2- There is actually a lot of value in being able to spin up a new repo instantly, in knowing that you can, and in practicing it often. Not unlike the move to VMs for development environments. Plus, there are definitely bad situations where a fresh git clone is the simpler way to go -- just not in this article. ;)
Anyway, I also agree with you because this blog post doesn't describe any truly bad situations, and because for years I've seen people blowing away their repos and starting over, and always thought to myself it was funny. It's a drastic action that takes more work than a rebase or reflog or whatever the problem was, and doesn't work well if you've made changes.
2- Yes, absolutely, it's good to remember that it's a fairly painless and easy process to spin up fresh clones. Though, if all you want is a fresh copy, in 99% of cases a "git clean -xfd" will do that for you (read the man page to find out what the options mean! man pages are your friend!). Though that one is generally a "pull ripcord in case of emergency" type of command, "git stash" generally suffices and avoids risk of losing data.
I don't recommend git stash, it frequently causes bad situations. Just branch instead, branching is safer and just as easy as stashing. Stash is not as safe as other git commands. From the man page: "If you mistakenly drop or clear stashes, they cannot be recovered through the normal safety mechanisms."
I think the nuclear option is pretty nice, since it solves every git problem I've ever heard of. All the "right" solutions only solve some particular slice of cases. Why should I be bothered to care?
There's a class of bad situations that nuke will make worse and not better. Any time you have un-pushed work, you're better off figuring out how to restore it with proper git commands than by nuking your repo. Dropped stashes or screwed up merges or rebase mistakes are all things that take some unavoidable time to learn how to fix.
Long term, it's best to thouroughly read the man pages, e.g. nicely formatted here: https://git-scm.com/docs
I've been doing that for a while for dropbear ssh, it does hit occasional problems but is overall more pleasant than straight git.
Now you mention it my git tags are out of date...
:)
s/branches/bookmarks/ and it's the same as git.
It's a cute website, and useful, I really like it. This sentence,
Bizarrely, git won't do a dif of files that have
been add-ed to your staging area without this flag.
File under ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
If you have a team that needs Git training, email me and we can deliver a instance of this webinar (complete with Q&A session) free of charge (as an introductory service).
2. For someone just starting out, I also recommend "Learn Enough Git to be Dangerous", https://www.learnenough.com/git-tutorial (HTML version available for free), from @mhartl, author of the popular RailsTutorial.org
3. The "Pro Git" book is great. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 A comprehensive resource.
Version control systems are an important part of the programmers toolkit and it's worth investing a little time to get the fundamentals right.
Sure git is not the friendliest of beasts but what it lacks in interface, it more than makes up in internal consistency and trying to learn it "inside out" is a better long term investment than having a list of ways to solve "git problems".
The irony is that if you think of git in terms of deltas, with branches just being tags to commits, and "git commit" actually being "git commit + move branch", then a lot of stuff is easier to reason about.
Like, if you get the notion of working tree, staging area, commits, and branches on a deep-ish level, things get easier. Things can still be hard, but there's a lot less "does running this cause everything to disappear???"
I think it would be possible to make this awesome page even more awesome with a little "annotated version" that gives the details of what you're actually doing.
Can you elaborate on that a little more? I liked where it was going -- because being able to explain how git works to someone coming from SVN has been an ongoing problem for me.
This way, you get a chain of commits, each pointing to the previous commit, and and branch references pointing to the last commit of each branch.
In this world, when you commit, you're doing two things: 1. Creating a new top level folder, e.g. "Project v42". 2. Updating the branch symlink you are on to point to that new folder.
I'm actually not simplifying things that much here, the main git addition is that each folder (revision) also has a list of previous folders (revisions) and that the folders (revisions) are not named sequentially, they are named based on a hash of their contents.
i agree, if you really want to be more productive (and without having to go find some git expert on your team) knowing how each operation works and why its doing what its doing is really beneficial.
despite that, its sometimes frustrating due to inconsistencies in the git "grammar" that i sometimes don't understand, like why if you want to apply only one file from git stash you have to use `git checkout` rather than `git stash apply [<stash>] -- <file>`. it makes "sense" but is unintuitive when i'm thinking about using stashed commits.
Thank you!
So you don't have three hours to read the fsckin' manual that describes how git repository is organized? O_o
For example, something as simple as "Changing the Last Commit" (as in "git commit --amend") is found in chapter 7.6 in the git book which is given as main documentation on git-scm.org. The first 6 chapter mainly deal with introducing the model, architecture and high level workflows. Even if you skip the chapter on github, that's still 5 chapters on mostly theory to read before you get to some often-used tool commands. I would argue that is more than 3 hours for most people if you don't just skim it but try to also understand it.
Apart from that, to answer the question: indeed, often I don't have 3 hours for something to be considered "nice to know" as opposed to "absolutely necessary". And if the manual is a "fsckin'" one, I'm unlikely to read it at all.
It's better to accept history as it is, and fix the problem with reverts, cherry-picking and new commits. History won't be as pretty or clean, but it will reflect what actually happened, which is what history is, after all.
The biggest trick to understanding git is to learn to think in commits rather than file content. If one branch has a commit and the other branch doesn't, merging them will mean that the commit is there. If one branch has the commit while the other branch has the commit and a revert for that commit, merging will mean it will be reverted.
Same goes with pushing. If you reset locally to before a commit that you already shared, that commit returns on your next pull. If you revert it, it will stay reverted.
The most dangerous thing git can do, is rebasing. Rebase changes history. This is fine if it hasn't been shared yet (you commited a new change and try to push, but remote changes need to be pulled first, so rebasing is fine). Rebasing is not fine if the commit has already been shared, through a different branch or a different remote repository, for example. In that case, you need a merge.
As pretty as rebase can make your history, you should really only use it when you understand what it does. If you don't, stick with merge.
Recorded history is not necessarily what actually happened though, often (or always, according to some) it's an interpretation.
"History is written by the victors" - Walter Benjamin?
The docs say:
All changes made by commits in the current branch but that are not in <upstream> are saved to a temporary area. This is the same set of commits that would be shown by git log <upstream>..HEAD
Cleaner history makes life much easier for those who will try to understand what you did weeks or months or even years later (including your future self).
Of course, you shouldn't (with rare exceptions) edit history you have already shared with others; but, I never found that concept, or the way git implements it, particularly hard to understand. (I will admit some of git's commands are hard to remember - I am always forgetting the difference between "git reset --hard" and "git reset --soft".)
See, I fundamentally disagree that this is what I wanted. When I merge my thing with change x into head I expect to see my changes actually go in. Not to see commits retroactively added to head. The merge was the action, not some weird rewriting of historical order of events.
> The biggest trick to understanding git is to learn to think in commits rather than file content.
Ok, I'm starting to see what you meant. (I didn't understand this until the second part and my being confused as heck)
Funny, I think the biggest problem is people who refuse to understand the caveats of rewriting shared history and spread FUD about it.
Git is basically Linus in a nutshell: abrasive, unforgiving, and behaving like an absolute asshole to any non-expert struggling user.
Sure, engineers should probably get to know its quirks and learn to work around them because it's now ubiquitous in the field, but let's not pretend that there's something virtuous about it. This is a piece of truly terrible software with an even worse UX that just happened to win the PR battle against its superior foes, because...Idunno, Linux, I guess?
> just happened to win the PR battle against its superior foes, because...Idunno, Linux, I guess?
The learning curve to git is not great but as far as I know nobody has publicly released an option that's improved enough over git to motivate the cost of switching technology. If it's not working for you the only advice I can give is either learn it until it is actually working for you rather than being in the way or try to find a better workflow.
Edit: also in a Windows environment, svn copes slightly better than git. First project we tried it on had the worst possible environment, a mix of Windows and Linux systems. Line ending nightmares everywhere.
It also took a while to work out how to kill (with fast-forward) the spurious "merge commit" you get every time someone does a pull. You don't have that with svn, you just do the merging locally when you update and it doesn't generate a commit.
For me Git was really a much needed upgrade to subversion. Working with branches (testing and production, we even have some repositories with multiple testing and production branches) are working like they are supposed to do. Changing commits (oops - I forgot to add one file) before pushing them to the repository for the other users is another big advantage. Working on multiple features in parallel - I couldn't do that with Subversion.
We've nearly completely eliminated the "handcrafted" local copies with multiple half finished features since changing to Git.
And if you want to use Git as a Subversion alternative you can use it in this mode too - altough you are missing out on some good new features.
I don't want to change back to Subversion.
The only disadvantage is that SourceTree (the GUI tool we are using) is a pretty lame duck in Windows. But the command line is excellent.
branches are branches in svn or git... your process may not have been correct, but lets not blame the tools here..
modifying commits is a big no-no for me, so thats not a drawback at all, the fact that its not possible in svn is a win for svn.
For one of our biggest projects branches in SVN didn't work at all.
We have multiple production, test and development branches and merge branches (features) from one branch to the other (development -> testing -> production). Sometimes we cherry pick a single commit to another branch.
In those days SVN wasn't so flexibel with branches as we wanted to (or we didn't understand it enough), so our workflow was much more rigid.
The SVN UI is just horrid in other dimensions, mainly the "you can't do that at all" one.
(getting down-voted for it, but someone has to say it)
tags should not be committed to... end-of-story.
as for 'svn-log not showing commits'... I've never heard of that one in the last decade of using it... I'm genuinely interested in how that came about.
I used SVN for 7 or 8 years and then Git for the past 3, with about a year of overlap (on different repos).
To me, Git is vastly superior. I tend to use it in quite an "SVN-like" fashion - there's a single main trunk branch that we all share - but in terms of what I can do locally it blows SVN out of the water.
The difference is that Git makes things that are hard or impossible in SVN trivial. So for e.g. I create local branches all the time; I commit a bunch of small changes locally as I experiment with a fix, and then `merge --squash` to leave a clean history for others; merging fixes across different branches is easy and just works.
Most people just spout the same sheep-like line "git>svn" without being able to justify it!
We see that a lot of companies(our clients/users) adopting Mercurial, you just don't hear about it. Often those are companies with employees that don't tweet or post to HN ;)
RhodeCode is used also in around 60 universities, and we learned that in a lot of them they teach Mercurial as well as Git.
For a large company it's actually much cheaper to adapt Mercurial as they new DVCS because of learning curve.
I hope companies like Facebook and Mozilla will make soon Mercurial very very fast. There's constant work on it coming from those companies to improve it.
I don't know any of the other distributed version control systems. The only other version control system I have much (too much) experience with is Subversion and it can't hold a candle against Git.
In my opinion Git is the C language of version control systems. If you are careless it's not the tool for you. Otherwise you have a really great tool with lots of power.
Not saying I disagree... but subversion is still king in the corporate-engineering companies and it tends to work well in those types of setups.
Just beware of having unjustified-opinions. SVN may not be trendy... but neither will git in a few years time.
BTW: Mercurial still beats them all.
For some values of "work". We're using SVN at my new job, with a single trunk branch. Not having the ability to commit locally, and mess around with local branches is a pain in the ass. I found a solution though. I cloned SVN repo using git-svn and now I can make local commits like a pro, and use my beloved magit (Emacs git interface).
(I used git in an cvs-to-svn migration, and stayed since.)
I know that many people don't like it, but I can fix up commits in my local repository and push the change upstream in one.
With SVN I wasn't able to do this, so it was a big pain if you had to fix a bug if you were in the middle of a big feature, or if you had an experimental feature you wanted to clean up and release a month later.
In an ideal world -- one where network effects of GitHub hadn't crushed all competition -- I'd get to choose Mercurial as my daily version-control system. It has similarities to git, in that both are largely user interfaces to a DAG, but its guiding philosophy and approach to the interface it exposes are far better in my opinion.
In my opinion Git is the C language of version control systems. If you are careless it's not the tool for you.
You probably don't want to make that assertion; we now have close to half a century of evidence that no human currently living can use C safely, and I don't think you'd want that to carry over to git. And it's not a matter of "careless" or not -- extremely intelligent, extremely-well-trained, extremely-careful people still write unsafe C.
You're right that C is the wrong tool for a lot of applications. But if you need total control and speed and power it still works for many projects.
Be that as it may, it's a common misconception that the more popular tool is always the better tool. There are a lot of factors to a tool's success and the technical ones are generally far less important than most people think.
Brushing aside some relatively minor differences, Mercurial is very similar to Git, except that it was designed by people that don't have an all-consuming disdain for all of humankind.
You forgot "brilliant".
He knows a lot about his domain, sure, but he's no god and there are a lot of areas he knows diddley-squat about.... user interface design for one!
And Einstein knew nothing about biology.
I'm sure he knows "diddley-squat" about most areas, but as long as he knows a lot about his domain then he's an expert.
And he is good at user interface design, and git is a good example of that; it's just not aimed at beginners. It was designed by and for expert users, and the interface fits that very well.
admittedly "expert" UIs are different from "noob" UIs, but the number of "git magic spell" followers out there mean that it isn't a good UI for the majority of people who use git.
Git being operable with a pry bar and repairable with a hammer is a good proof that in this context it's a good design.
Chalk that up to the power of fashion. Otherwise, people would use an SCM that doesn't destroy their work in the blink of an eye and actually has an API that deserves the name.
And (c) lose the entire subtree the repo is in.
I think besides a PR battle (there's PR people for RCS'es??) I think Git won out because "the server was free". Competitors at the time needed a big (if there were large numbers of committers) server that someone had to pay for. By that I mean the hardware to host the server -- Git needs either none, or a very lightweight machine for a server.
The Git DAG and its content-addressable file system are an elegant solution to the problem of distributed version control. The implementation is clean and dead-simple, yet immensely powerful. This is the basis of good engineering.
> an even worse UX
Git was designed to expose its underlying implementation and not to isolate the user from it. Unlike other systems, its subcommands give the user the ability to manipulate the underlying data structure directly.
That doesn't mean it has a bad UX. Just that it has the UX of a power tool.
I also think that Git played a big role in the growth and popularity of command-line tools over the past decade. And that its interface inspired the subcommand pattern that is now commonplace in docker, vagrant, and others.
I disagree. "spell X solves problem Y" is an excellent way to both get started with fixing your Y fast AND for learning a system deeper.
I think we better learn by example (such as that) and in practical use over time, as opposed to getting some abstract knowledge of the whole system first, or (god forbid) reading the manual, which noone does.
Some coworkers (across all experience levels) use Git this way. It's frustrating how slowly they learn and conversely, how inefficiently they work.
Which again, we learn best by absorbing bits and pieces piecemeal over time -- that's how toddlers learn their native language, by immersion. Not by getting some "understanding of fundamentals" course first.
Generally there are (roughly) three approaches depending on where you are in your journey from beginner to expert:
As a beginner, you need specific, detailed, step-by-step instructions: First run X, then run Y, finally run Z, if something goes wrong along the way, follow these other steps, if that doesn't work, ask someone for help.
Once you've moved beyond being a beginner, you understand how the different steps are connected, so you already know the intermediate steps and just need to be told the task at hand: do an X (e.g. "move these commits onto the other branch").
An expert fully understands all the inner workings and just needs to be told the big picture: this is what I have, that is what I want, make it happen.
If you try to instruct experts like beginners, they will be frustrated because it seems so tedious and you're not giving them the information they want: what you're trying to do. If you try to instruct beginners like experts, they will be horribly confused because they don't know how to make any of it happen without you laying out each individual step they need to follow.
A case can be made that a beginner should learn each individual operation by heart before moving on to the next one (like kata in martial arts) but this style of learning assumes you're willing to spend a lifetime perfecting a single art. It's unlikely git will stick around that long and for most of its users git is just a tiny (though important) aspect of their work.
> As a beginner, you need specific, detailed, step-by-step instructions: First run X, then run Y, finally run Z, if something goes wrong along the way, follow these other steps, if that doesn't work, ask someone for help.
That's one way to do it, but it's not preferable. I would rather sit the beginner down for at least an hour and go through the basic concepts with them.
I've taught Git to a few people (mostly fellow students or colleagues) and I found that they have a much easier time when they are introduced early on to the basic concepts of Git (the commit graph, and branches/tags as pointers into the graph), they have a much easier time grasping relevant tasks like merge and rebase.
For specific questions (mostly in these "I screw up" moments), a whiteboard is also really helpful to explain them how the two or three magic commands that I tell them are actually fixing things up.
I agree completely! Anytime you give a list of 'run this command', I think you've actually written a CLI tool in the wrong language (English instead of a programming language).
At work, we want to increase dev's confidence with git in the next few months. We're making sure to separate out 'Technical' knowledge (what do steps do I perform to recover a deleted branch) from 'Conceptual' knowledge (why would it be a good/bad idea to delete a branch, how branches are intended to be used, understanding what git thinks a branch is, etc.). The former go into git aliases or CLI swiss army knife tool, the latter into training videos and workshops.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28759887/git-gc-no-space-...
> This usually happens to me if I merge to master, then run tests/linters.
If this happens on more than one occasion, I’d strongly consider creating a pre-commit hook to run tests and/or lint the changed files, e.g., I run `checkbashisms` and `shellcheck` as a pre-commit hook when working on shell scripts.
Ie, if the implementation of Git is right, but only the cli commands/etc are wrong.. what would the right UX be? What would a friendly UX look like?
Seems like something a lot of people could love - even if blasphemy to Git purists.
Just git reset <ref> should do. The --soft flag is implicit.
Amending and rebasing is something you should be careful with. If you've already pushed, you'll now need to force push. If another person has put new commits upstream, they will be wiped out irreparably. Not saying don't do it, just that it's very risky.
Instead of deleting and recloning the repo at the end, if you're really at that point, just doing git reset --hard origin/master should be equally as effective with fewer steps and less time.
Pulling down the repo a second time, however, can be more useful for just having a snapshot of the code in a second location that is totally independent of git traffic (don't pull to it very often). Say someone force pushes something that removes code. Your snapshot or someone else's non-pulled repo is your only hope of getting it back.
Regarding the case of an erroneous force push removing code, usually things can be recovered by looking through the reflog and doing some surgery via the lower-level plumbing commands... it's not exactly a fun process though :)
I wish I still had a log of the conversation or remembered the exact problem that led up to it, but it involved a simple amend totally screwing up my repo, and I've avoided it since.
Amend after push, I could see. You commit, push, amend, push, but after your first push someone else pushes... then you have two heads. I could see that, but I'm guessing you'd mention that if it were the case.
If one were to attempt avoiding amend you could always make all changes in a feature branch and rebase this branch onto your target afterwards, squashing commits.
Once other people can be expected to have done work based on your amended or rebased work, you can expect some annoyances (or worse). If you haven't pushed yet (or if you're really, really sure nobody's basing further work on something you've recently pushed), I say go crazy and amend and rebase to your heart's content.
Amending your commit in your own feature branch or fork isn't a problem. I often amend commits to make a cleaner git history to ease PR/code review.
git checkout master
git checkout -b 10-new-feature
# Make changes
git add example.code
git commit
git push origin 10-new-feature
# Oops... left a debug message, fix it.
git add example.code
git commit --amend
git push -f # Rewrites the remote history with your local modified version
I've often had the thought that if everyone did this it could have potential to be quite the open-sourced collection of material - a distributed self-answered Stack Overflow perhaps.
Is there any sanity in this? Or would posting everything as self-answers to Stackoverflow be more welcome to the average Googler? (higher ranking, better meta, more likely for the user to see it and community features such as commenting/voting/editing)
http://www.slideshare.net/ChristianCouder/git-back-onyourfee...
I was expecting some actual "bad" situations based on the title, and to be fair these were bad to me once and are bad for people new to git, but I'd love to see the level 2,3,etc. version of this article.
* Learn Git Branching (gentle introduction to git's UI, with a visualization of the DAG) [0]
* Git for ages 4 and up (beginner-oriented, teaches you how to model git's internal concepts, 90m video) [1]
* Git from the bottom-up (high-level overview of git's internal data structures) [2]
* My Git Habits (sophisticated, you will have to study the man pages used to completely internalize the workflow) [3]
[0]: http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/
[1]: https://youtu.be/1ffBJ4sVUb4
Because otherwise, how can I be sure that some tool didn't mess up my repo, and one day I'll be getting error messages when checking out files, etcetera?
The "correct" course of action prior to using the bfg-repo-cleaner is to make a complete copy of the target .git directory. I've used it many times and it seems quite reliable, but if nothing else, that's a good defense against terminating it halfway through accidentally or something. (Of course even without that, you shouldn't be operating on the only copy of your .git repo anyhow since it is almost certainly somewhere else, too, or you wouldn't be having the problem bfg-repo-cleaner is designed to solve in the first place. But losing your own local branches and work is still a pain.)
git add .
Add the single change you missed, or even better, `git add -p`, to add chunks manually.
git reset --hard origin/master
git branch some-new-branch-name
git reset --hard origin/master
git checkout some-new-branch-name git checkout correct-branch
git cherry-pick wrong-branch
git checkout wrong-branch
git reset --hard HEAD~Also, if you have more than one commit before you noticed you were on the wrong branch, this only grabs the one commit.
Not sure what's bizarre about that. Doing so helps keep your commits clean and helps git tools (diff, git-gutter, etc) by ignoring things you've already stated are complete.
For example, I quickly fix a bug. The code is ugly and I don't want to commit it yet. So I add the bugfix files. Then I clean up the code (before commiting). Now I can do another diff between the staged and unstaged files, checking that it looks better than before, and still works. This way there is 1 clean commit "bugix" and not 2 commits "bugfix" and "bugfix code cleanup"
http://gitready.com/ contains a number of small articles categorized by beginner, intermediate and advanced that might be helpful.
Another resource for commonly used git tips and tricks: https://github.com/git-tips/tips
Like cherry picking, force pushing, merge --no-commit, rebasing... almost any operation can end up going wrong.
Just pay attention.
cd ..
sudo rm -r fucking-git-repo-dir
git clone https://some.github.url/fucking-git-repo-dir.git # create a new branch from the current state of master
git checkout -b some-new-branch-name
# remove the commit from the master branch
git checkout master
cd ..
sudo rmdir nsfw-git-repo-dir
Still, amusing :)
alias gitshit="open http://ohshitgit.com/"
Two days ago, I wanted to delete .git only, but accidentally as my fingers were accustomed with -fr , the command was `rm -fr * .git`. Rails server was running and some hope arose at the moment to just `lsof | grep` .. unfortunately that didn't work with me !
Ironically, all dot files have stuck as obvious :)
Those wouldn't have if you had set the following:
shopt -s dotglobThis is a feat of engineering, to take something complex and make it easy for anyone to undestand and use. It shows real expertise and deep understanding of the area.
In many ways it's a shining example against the 'culture of complexity' that we increasingly find ourselves in. Here rather than simplying the objective is to be to make thing as complex as possible, usually in pursuit of extremely niche use cases or because either the expertise or the interest to simplify is not there. If git was designed in this culture it would be fragile, full of buzz words, poorly documented and prone to failure, and something only a few self appointed experts could reason about and use properly.
Am I the only one that runs my tests before committing, let alone merging to master?
That's pretty much git 101
1. Click "Run all tests"
If you don't want to change the commit message, in addition to --amend:
git commit --amend --no-editOh shit, someone checked-in huge file that shouldn't be in repo.
Oh shit, this folder I had been working on should have been in its own repo.
I also still say "new up" an object thanks to him. I'm not so proud of that one.
Until I switched, there was always a panic when branching or merging. With git, I can branch like a nutter and things seem to still work out in the end.
Not sure why, perhaps someone else has a perspective on it.
And conflicts from 'stash pop' are somewhat counterintuitive to handle.
Of the sites that are mostly static content, I would estimate around 60%. There's a small chunk of sites that are just blank with JS disabled, and there's a larger chunk that will load images only when JS is enabled.
60% is better than I'd expect for sites you expect to work without JS. =)
- ajax.googleapis.com and the like
- somethingsomething.cloudfront.com
- variations of the same domain (for example, hn.algolia.com queries algolia.net and algolianet.com)
By the way, it's a very valid question whether my model is actually more secure than just uBlock, but I like it on an emotional level because I feel in control.
However would appreciate a quick and dirty handbook.
git checkout otherbranch
git checkout firstbranch -- fileIwant maybe1more
git commit -m "brought over files"I kept having problems with git, so I read a fucking book on it https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
I'm not saying I never get into situations I can't get myself out of, but the examples in the oh shit website now look like obviously trivialities.
I noticed that git errors on my team were almost eliminated when we started doing that - especially once I started adding sanity checks to the git workflows. It also allowed members of the team who previously struggled with git to contribute much more effectively - they'd be rebasing without even necessarily knowing what rebasing was, for instance.
It also meant that the git workflow, if it was version controlled, could also be amended.
This worked out much better than the git course people were sent on.
Fine, that might be cheaper than properly training your employees. Of course, if your employees aren't training themselves out of genuine interest that's really the only option.
But then once something goes wrong you'll have to resort to "oh shit" websites and hope that you can the exact issue that you're having, since you really don't understand what's going on anyway.
> This worked out much better than the git course people were sent on.
I submit this must be because people came out of the course without really understanding the tool. Why they didn't understand I won't speculate, but I submit that they didn't.
EDIT: I think that which one is more appropriate depends on where it's used. I a big structured company I can believe that yours is better, or even crucial. But on a scenario where I'm starting a company with two other guys on a garage, I wouldn't want the guys to be the type of people who can only use a workflow that someone designed for them and never had the interest to dig under.
If things went wrong, people could come to me. That often resulted in me fixing their problem and fixing the script to ensure that kind of problem didn't happen again - after which people stopped coming to me because they didn't have problems.
Basically it was like releasing software.
>I submit this must be because people came out of the course without really understanding the tool.
I submit that not everybody needs to be an expert in the tool. Non-programmers can actually help a lot with writing stuff that needs to be version controlled with code - e.g. writing test scripts, updating translations, various configurations, etc.
Perl 5 -- I don't know enough about 6 to know whether this is still the case -- involved a couple of design decisions which worked well for one subset of people and did whatever the complete polar opposite of "works" is for a different subset of people.
One of those design decisions is the famous "there's more than one way to do it". Ask five Perl programmers to solve a simple problem in the language and you'll get fourteen solutions, and no way of knowing which, if any, is to be preferred in real-world use. Git similarly tends to have multiple ways of achieving a given goal, and endless words have been devoted to documenting them; nobody has yet settled which of them is or should be generally recommended, or if there even can be such things as generally-recommended ways to use git.
Perl also involves an incredible amount of memorization. The large collection of "magic" variables which can be read or set to determine language and local-scope behavior are daunting and can't be mastered through any process other than rote memorization. And the differing behavior of basic operations depending on context produces a combinatorial explosion of possibilities which, again, are not amenable to any technique short of rote memorization. The same is true in git: though there are underlying abstractions, the interface provided to them is inconsistent, varies depending on sometimes-invisible contextual factors, and ends up requiring rote memorization of commands and options and how they behave in any given situation.
Unfortunately, no amount of documentation or review by technical writers can fix this. A bad API can't be made good through better documentation, it can only be made good through being replaced with a better API.
Git is worse than Perl. Perl is just opinionated: despite what you are saying about it is true, you can write working programs and have fun at all levels of Perl mastery. There's a lot to memorize, but you can start coding immediately and do something useful. Also, Perl community is incredibly friendly and helpful.
Not so with Git. If you start without thorough understanding how Git internals work, you will get burned really soon. And more often than not, the only response you'll get is the arrogant RTFM or the link to Pro Git book.
Next on the list: Larry McVoy's Bitkeeper promises to be everything git and Mercurial aren't. (git is "inspired" (read: copycat) by Bitkeeper).
It's funny how Sun Microsystems influenced the industry in so many ways, isn't it?