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Comment by yissp | Hacker News Reader

Gah, I'm beginning to think the git CLI is trying to be confusing on purpose.

https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/

Is the zen of git to stop using git? Somewhat inspired by OpenBSD I spun up my most recent side project with cvs. I'm amazed how much less stressful code management has become. Makes me want to go further back in time and learn how to properly use rcs.

I think the author of that blog post prefers Mercurial.

Now try a merge.

I've done a few, it's been fine. If you try and use cvs like git sure you're going to get burned. There's a reason Linux was using Bitkeeper and not cvs after all. But if your project organization works well with cvs, you can seriously avoid the massive wad of incidental complexity that is git.

I mean, when I was using cvs because cvs was the only thing I could use I don't think I was trying to use it like git and I was still pretty happy when better things came along. Subversion and perforce in particular improved merging massively long before git came onto the scene.

CVS was fine for small projects with a couple devs at most. Anything more than that and you needed someone on your project with far more domain knowledge in cvs than git requires now to avoid losing all your data in a botched operation on the thousands of independent rcs files a repo consisted of, so I really can't agree about avoiding massive wads of incidental complexity.

Git is, if anything, far simpler than cvs in just about every way imo. I could see myself using subversion for a lark, but I'm very happy if I never have to touch cvs again.

> The novice thought for a few moments, then asked: "Surely some of these could be made more consistent, so as to be easier to remember in the heat of coding?"

> Master Git snapped his fingers. A hobgoblin entered the room and ate the novice alive. In the afterlife, the novice was enlightened

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