Git's user interface isn't perfect, but you're not going to get the "Mac of DVCSs" either. There's a reason for the complexity, doing stuff like merging together the work of three people is inherently complex.
You're not going to come up with some solution that allows the user to "just do it" without also destroying history.
Really? I've got state A and state B. I tell my DVCS to merge them into state C. After reviewing the automatically guessed changes and manually changing the things which could not be guessed, I commit C'. C' is successor to both A and B.
What exactly has been lost / destroyed here?
1. Checkout B. 2. Merge A into B. 3. Git tells you there's a merge conflict and what to do to fix it: "Auto-merging foo CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in foo Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result." 4. Edit foo and fix the conflict. 5. "git add foo" 6. Commit.
What's the problem?
What I meant to say is that you're not going to get away with using any sort of complex system without understanding what it's doing. This seems to be the sentiment expressed in the original posting, and some of the replies here.
Sure, Git's UI could be improved. But managing several divergent histories and correctly merging them together is a non-trivial problem. If you make a tool that allows the user to just plow on without understanding the underlying paradigm the results are going to suffer.
It's like asking for a RDBMS that allows you to "just do it". You might get away with that for a while, but not for long.
This is a limitation of your imagination. You can write a DVCS that's easy to use and intuitive. Git has an absolutely terrible UI, it borders on idiotic.
One example of a DVCS with a good design and UI is a Bazaar. Sortof like the Mac a few years ago, no one uses it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually gains in popularity. I see two things holding it back right now:
- Launchpad is terrible and needs to be at least as good as Github.
- In concert with having a terrible "hub", Bazaar has a small community of users.
To gain users, it will need to out-innovate like Apple did. That means on all fronts, not just bzr itself but the community, marketing, and the websites that support it.
- Being pure Python it doesn't have the same performance that git does. This may not show up in day-to-day usage, but things like 'convert this svn repo to Bazaar' tend to bring the bottlenecks/performance issues into the light.
- Bazaar made this weird design decision to have two revision numbers. a 'r12345' type revision number that is similar to SVN, but only applies to your local checkout of the repo, and a checksum (SHA1 or MD5) which applies globally (across different checkouts). I think that choosing a revision scheme similar to SVN's but one that doesn't map 1-to-1 with SVN is just asking for confusion from newbies. (I'm not entirely sure why one needs to have local and global revision numbers...)
1. You can abbreviate the SHA-1's in git
2. When you are collaborating on code, it's much more common to use a global identifier so that people can all know which commit is being referenced. It seems like you are making things needlessly complex when you are trying to maintain local and global revision numbers, for little (in my opinion) return. Sure 'r37' is easier to remember off-hand than '5b98d8f' (a shortened SHA1), but if you memorize 'r37' it only means something locally, you'll still have to lookup the global revision id when you want to communicate with others.
Well, hg is nearly all Python (if I recall, their diff algorithm is the only C code) and it's quite comfortably fast. Seems to me that it's a design issue with Bazaar, and not something that one can simply blame on Python.