Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

My criteria for whether an interface to git is truly easier is whether artists can use it. I've worked in games alongside artists, with everyone using Perforce. At some point we switched to Perforce for the art, and git for the programmers, with a big janky glue system in-between.

Git couldn't really handle all the binary assets, and the artists couldn't really handle git, so it made sense. When we switched, it also took a long time before the programmers could really handle git too, fwiw.

I've long said I'd love to see something that's as nice a GUI as p4v, but with git under the hood. I haven't yet seen a git GUI that even approaches now nice p4v is, and git on the command line, once you learn it, is the best interface to git hands down.

I can't tell, but does gitless look like it could make a simpler gui to anyone else? I love the idea of gitless, I'll have to try it, but I get the sense that I'd end up needing to switch to git for some things.

View on HN

As far as version-controlling art, I'd lean towards a system where checking a file out locks it from any other concurrent modifications. Unfortunately, trying to merge concurrent changes into an image file, for instance, is just about impossible.

It's almost as bad trying to work with MS Office file types - I wish I could get people on my team to use something else that is more VCS friendly, like HTML or Markdown, but that's an uphill battle. Even better would be if we actually used the versioning and collaboration features that are built into some of the tools like Office 365 that we pay for, but can't seem to leverage...

Yeah, exactly. Perforce has file locking, and the need to file-lock binary assets is a great example of why a central server setup has advantages over a DVCS in some cases.

The alternative to file locking could be a rule set for who or which branches win when there are conflicts in binary data. Then again, as an artists you would rather know if someone's touching an asset before you dig in. With art & binary assets, it's more important than with mergeable code that your team and work is properly organized in a way that avoids multiple people touching the same file.

My wife is a math teacher and trying to figure out a good workflow for her team has been illuminating. Only the one true desktop Word has a good formula editor, so they have to use that... and only SharePoint provides a good "open and save" workflow. So SharePoint it is. Anything to get them off timeshares.

Ick, fileshares. Autocorrect.

Re. GUIs for git, have you taken a look at GitKraken [1]? I haven't had the chance to put it through its paces, but it looks pretty good.

[1]: https://www.gitkraken.com/

I recently switched to GitKraken from SourceTree. SourceTree has better features and workflow, but SourceTree performance is very VERY terrible. I'm talking 2+ minutes to wait for some operations to complete.

Not sure why GitKraken makes it so hard to add remote repositories and doesn't allow auto-push, and other niceties. But I use it for normal checkin / branch switching workflows and it's great.

I have. I've used all of the git GUIs. None are as good as p4v as far as a GUI goes, and none are particularly usable by artists. Especially powerful in p4v is the timelapse view, which nothing in any git client comes close to approaching.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com