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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you are not taking the time it takes to get to know the concepts in git or are not given the time. One does not become proficient in a DVCS in a day. It takes time and practice. It is important to note, that git is distributed. It is a big leap from SVN. What you perceived as simple before might have been a serious risk everyone took.

I've once tried to use SVN before I learned about git. I was terrified to do something wrong. I did not understand the concepts well. I just did not get it. Fortunately I did not stick around with it, but learned a little bit of git shortly after. Then simply Used what little I knew. Then at some point tagging. Then feature branches. Submodules. Pull requests. You learn step by step and don't get overwhelmed by git's complexity.

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SVN has much simpler concepts and a much smaller "surface area" to learn because it is a centralized versioning system. If you don't need the features of a distributed versioning system then there's little reason for using git (apart from "everybody's using git", which of course may be the strongest reason to adopt it too).

Git branching and merging vastly out classes svn, coupled with its ability to version directory deletes and renames which svn struggled with, it makes much more sense than svn.

Most SVN workflows did not use branching and merging, becuase it was such a pain in the ass with SVN.

You folks are right about the confusion between git and the workflow, most folks use gitflow which uses master, develop and feature branches. Others like gitlabflow are quite different, but still make use of git's far better branching and merging.

Correction: Most company workflows did not use branching and mandatory code review because they started 10+ years ago and that was not widespread practice at the time... for a variety of reasons.

Usability has always been a problem as well as tooling support (merging algorithms really used to suck and generate conflicts all over the place, not specific to SVN or to git). Git made some things easier and some things harder. I'd personally rather have a sane command line interface (that I use every day) than the ability to track a rename twice a year.

The time is always there, but not letting getting angry about a change eat it up and providing an excuse ("I'll just procrastinate, that'll show them!") is key. That means taking the biggest hurdle to learning. Mngt/Life/You could have not forced the change, but that's how it goes.

In case of git, try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sjqTHE0zok

I'm keeping an open mind definitely, maybe it's a matter of time and learning the ins-and-outs as you mentioned. My number one philosophy though has always been KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) and I think I’m off put by complexities in general, not because they’re difficult to learn or understand but just out of principal I think simple is good and complex is bad. Will give it more time though and see.

beware of the difference between simple and too simple though!

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