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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

What's the cliff? Widespread successful, productive collaboration?

Your repo being eaten by some arcane git 'feature' that you had no idea even existed, and then when you ask for help you get a 50/50 split between "that shouldn't have happened" and "well of course, you have to run 'git --unfubar repo' every 431 checkins or it'll corrupt your repo, seriously who doesn't know that?"

the fact that you use the word "checkins" strongly implies that this has never happened to you.

Or that I used the generic term rather than the git-specific term?

I don't know if you're intentionally trolling, but I have been using version control for almost 20 years now and have never used the term check-in. All version control software that I've used in that time used the term commit.

Perforce, TFS, Subversion, and Mercurial all use or recognize "check in" at least as a verb, and "changeset" at least used to be common as a noun.

I'm well aware of that, but the ggp was arguing that "check in" is a generic term and "commit" isn't. That's pretty obviously nonsense.

Uh, where? I said "check in" is a generic term (which it is - it's listed as the first synonym for 'commit' here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control#Common_vocabul... ). I never mentioned the term "commit" (which is obviously also a common term for the same action). Then you suggested I was trolling, for saying it was a generic term, which it is. Now you're putting words in my mouth and calling them nonsense.

Please stop.

Here's what you wrote:

> Or that I used the generic term rather than the git-specific term?

In the context of the discussion, generic term refers to "check in", and git-specific term refers to "commit" (which is the only possible alternative term to be using in that context). The obvious reading is that you're calling "commit" a git-specific term.

So I wouldn't say I'm putting words into your mouth, unless you were unaware that "commit" is the correct alternative term, which is of course a possibility that I didn't consider.

That's hilarious given that Fossil was notorious for actually corrupting data, which is one of the few things people hardly ever bitch about with git. The fact that you are running into this frequently enough to rant about it suggests maybe you aren't familiar enough with the tool?

If a version control tool, when used correctly, ever barfs on your data, that's too frequently. And I wasn't praising Fossil, just raising my gripe with git.

Git is much more complicated and harder to grasp, most people I know just remember common operations and commands to issue without understanding what these really do.

Also unless your organization's project is open source, you don't really need DVCS. In my organization we use git nearly exclusively, but in the end everything relies on the central repo. We actually would do much better if we used SVN instead of git and have less issues. For example we already had significant mistakes such as someone delete main branch or performed a force push (yes, you can restrict it, but with git you need to know what to expect before blocking it). We also have repo for CMS, where we would greatly benefit from ability to merge by directory. I also see people trying to checkout latest version from git for just specific subfolder, but with that is also difficult, but trivial and extremely lightweight on SVN.

Yes, for still has very valuable tools for the local developer: stash, staging changes, bisect, local history (great if you work without internet access), but you can actually use git with other SCM and get the best out of both worlds.

Unfortunately when I mention that we could have our main repo under SVN, people look at me like some kind of dinosaur that is proposing it, because I get confused by git.

Just because git is a great tool for Linux kernel development, doesn't mean that it is the best SCM for for your organization. And if your organization uses something else than git, it doesn't mean you can't use git, in fact the tool of my choice is still git, I just think that most companies don't need DVCS for their main repo.

The bug that nobody knows about that will delete all git repos in 5 minutes.

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