Hacker News Reader

Comment by ropeadopepope | Hacker News Reader

> It’s not hard to “really understand Git”.

Are you going to tell me you've never lost work because you didn't know git well enough to avoid putting your branch into a bad state?

View on HN

I’ve never lost work that I committed, which is the most you can ask of a version control system.

You've never botched a merge, try to undo it and accidentally lost work? It's happened to me and/or the people I work with roughly once a quarter since I started using git.

You shouldn't be able to lose any committed work in git. If you botch a merge, you can reset to one of the merge parents and try it again. If you botch a "destructive" operation like a reset or a rebase, you can undo it using the reflog, which is essentially a 30-day undo history for every branch in your repository.

No, I can't say that I've ever lost work in that manner in over a decade of using git. The first few times I made a mess of things while trying to do a nontrivial merge it admittedly took a while to figure out how to get back to my starting point, but I guessed (correctly) that it'd be worth spending that time to learn how to do it rather than giving up and throwing away work.

Care to share a botched merge story of yours? I try to learn from others mistakes.

No, I would ask also, that I routinely manage to commit successfully what I change vs. losing my changes when trying to commit them.

Fair—that hasn’t happened to me either, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com