Hacker News Reader

Flip your questions around. Might someone who isn't on a team, and doesn't need an audit trail, want something simpler?

Versioned files systems, including Apple's Time Machine and Dropbox's version history, have no extra UI to save versions. A small, short-lived project with at most a few collaborators (eg, working on a small scientific paper) might find those more useful than git or other VCS.

View on HN

I would have to agree with this. I have been programming for decades and I haven't had to work on a team for a project. "Branches" have not happened, nor have I ever felt the lack of them.

I would not mind something simple. I find the arguments, flags, whatever in git to be rather opaque. That, coupled with the lack of need for its features, have not thrilled me.

It seems to be pretty effective if you have tons of programmers working on a single project, but at the bottom end of the scale, I find it baffling.

I particularly enjoy IntelliJ's local history, which will go so far as to tell me whether the tests were passing or failing (and how many failed) on a specific file at a specific point in time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com