I think this is uncharitable at best. It was a huge step forward compared to then popular VCSs such as Subversion, I have loved working with Git since it was created and I still enjoy working with it every day.
Of course, Git won for a reason, but I doubt that it wouldn't have still won had it incorporated some UX design ideas from Mercurial or elsewhere.
> I have loved working with Git since it was created and I still enjoy working with it every day.
I have been profoundly frustrated by working with Git every day, hence the article, and the linked set of tools which I wrote to improve my workflow. Not even because its mental model is hard to grasp or that the UI is poor, but because it doesn't even streamline the kinds of workflows that it should be good at (in the article, and discussed in its own `gitworkflows` man page).
1. Linus Torvalds wrote it
2. GitHub
3. Linus Torvalds wrote it
To be fair, there are some real differences; e.g. there is no easy "hg rebase" by design, and whether that's a good or bad thing has been a topic of contention for about 15 years. But that Linus wrote it gave it a huge boost, and GitHub really was much better than many things that came before it (and arguably, still is).
I don't think performance was the main motivator; from what I recall it was mostly that Linus felt that the subversion model was "completely broken" and that there weren't any good distributed "bitkeeper-like" tools out there (and then, suddenly, there were three).
"When we first started working on Mercurial, we found that it was slower than Git in several notable areas. To narrow this performance gap, we’ve contributed over 500 patches to Mercurial over the last year and a half."
https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-data/scaling-merc...
Personally I can't recall any serious performance difference after I switched from mercurial (which included some large-ish repos) to git, but it's been quite a few years ago and perhaps I just forgot.
Like the one I use semi often (aliased to re) is "git reset HEAD~1". If you read the Git book, you know what reset does, you know that HEAD is where you currently are, and you know that "~1" means "commit before". So you tell git to reset current tree to commit before the one you're currently on (essentially "undo commit").
Actually, having "git undo" to "revert whatever I just done, regardless of what it was" and "--explain" ("tell me what I am about to do") would probably help a lot...
0.5. it doesn't get in the way of getting things done (at least most of the time)
A lot of the UI simplicity of other tools rests on not doing (3). For example, OP awards negative points for rebase but as far as I am concerned I won't even consider using a UI that doesn't support rebase.
I don't. This is "worse is better" at its core! https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Simplicity of implementation prioritised over simplicity of interface can take you a lot further than the other way around, in a fast-changing, experimenting environment.
I do have a bunch of aliases and one added command (shortcut to deleting some stuff) but nothing really more complex that shortening up commonly used stuff.
Mercurial Queues exists and people use(d) it. It has many, many more footguns than Git, and it's shockingly easy to loose work. The fact that this was ever acceptable is interesting.
Phabricator is not good, or at least not as good GitLab, GitHub, or Gerrit (IMO). This is important, because Git alone is half the picture nowadays.
The extensibility of Mercurial is also interesting, and leads to codebase-specific commands. This is maybe good for long-term developers, but makes onboarding new hires just that much harder.
So Mercurial's UX being that much better than Git is - in my very limited experience - a myth.
I started using Mercurial as the first serious DVCS I used (dabbling earlier with things like bzr) and my experience doesn’t support this at all.
I think it’s hard to underestimate the degree to which familiarity skews these assessments, especially with the additional confounding factors of project custom and experience. If you first used Git when contributing to a larger or more complex project than you were used to, it’s easy to misattribute the challenges to the tool and forget that everything got easier with experience using any DVCS.
This is especially true for the not uncommon case where the problem is really that someone has strong opinions about how they think the tool should work and refuses to learn its actual design - I’ve known multiple people who ranted about Git who were also the guys who hacked up their development boxes before saying a project was too hard to install (“Python packaging is terrible!” “Didn’t you use sudo to overwrite /usr/bin/python with Python 3 right before getting all of those Unicode decode errors?”), or, in one notable case, say Debian packaging was broken after they manually upgrade MySQL and somehow managed to render the system unbootable.
The reality is, Git is unintuitive, and makes nearly every common thing the average person wants to do a complete pain in the ass. I understand you (and I) know how to get things done using Git, but as a society and a technically community, we should strive to make things better.
When learning to program, you end up in arcane states. When learning languages, you end up in arcane states. Even when learning how to drive, I ended up in arcane states.
Obviously a bit of hyperbole, but when hopefully when you learn it and end up in weird states, you have a companion helping you to correct course.
From my experience as sysadmin the people having problem with it also highly correlate with people that just chmod 777 on server if something doesn't work and they don't understand why...
What's worse, is that a lot of people who seem to be asking for the same workflows actually have slightly (or significantly!) different conceptual models of what they want, so we end up in this weird place where we think we all want the same thing but actually don't.
If anything, git has clearly demonstrated that this is a complex space, and its perceived unusability stems from the fact that the operations it supports simply map onto basic graph operations.
Switching Git to Mercurial, or pretty much any other actual DVCS ain't going to make life of artist or someone tech-clueless any better, because while UI might be improved they still don't know what exactly they are doing or why
It’s also a UX nightmare. I work with tons of artists and engineers from the games and film industry.
Teaching git to an artist is painful. UIs work, till they invariably fall apart and then they’re confused again in the command line. Also most UIs can’t abstract the ideas to a good easy system.
Even a ton of very experienced engineers fall over when you touch rebasing etc…
Now people will say use Perforce. Well that has its own issues around branching/streaming and integration for code etc… plus you’re tied to their systems, and I’m not convinced their UX is great either, just better.
Plastic SCM seems to be the best so far but I haven’t really put it through the paces much.
Anyway I guess my point is: git is a fantastic technology marred with bad UX. It’s much like GIMP or Blender back in the day that had terrible UX as well, but have since improved greatly.
I’d love to see a rethink of the git UX at the UI level, that can guide even the most novice programmer through everything easily.
Edit: also I know invariably someone will say to make my own Ui instead of complaining. I’ve tried. I’ve done some novel things but it’s really hard to do from a top down level without also rethinking some of the base interaction model. That’s a battle I think needs a lot of effort across the stack first.
Ouch. Just use TortoiseSVN (+ svn)? I've had good success with it with business users.
Games, especially AAA games, have 10s or 100s of terabytes of source assets. Git was never designed to handle this. git-lfs is a hack to try to help here but it's bolting on a workaround for a system that was never designed for managing art assets.
It's also not designed to handle the fact that generally art assets are not mergable and so it doesn't handle coordination of editing assets (making sure 2 artists don't edit the same asset at the same time)
No amount of UX is going to fix that git is the wrong tool for managing art assets.
update: Googling for gamedev asset management this came up
https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-dam
I have no idea if it's good or bad but hopefully it shows some ideas for how git is the wrong tool for art asset management
Firstly, I’d already mentioned perforce.
But secondly , and this is my fault for not going into detail, I never said it was a game. There’s tons of software engineering categories with 3D art that are software heavy , so git wins out due to the ratio of engineers to artists.
Third, git with lfs configured from the get go isn’t that much worse than perforce with the exception of shallow and partial checkouts still being a pain. Otherwise perforce brings its own pains and UX hurdles. Streams and reviews for example are really rough to work with compared to git.
Lastly there’s just so much infrastructure around git. From hosting to CI/CD. Having multiple VCS is painful
git-lfs only solves storage. It doesn't solve the 50 other things that are special about art assets.
Lastly there’s just so much infrastructure around git.
All that infra has nothing to do with art assets though. Again, looking at art as nail because all you have is a hammer (git)
It’s easy to say “you should use XYZ” in a vacuum but there are often always tons of other reasons to pick a solution.
Thanks for your thoughts, but they assume I’m not well versed in the domain enough to make the correct decisions for my teams.
It’s also besides the original point that git has a very poor UX. Like yeah there may be things with better UX, but that doesn’t lessen the original criticism nor does it mean one should switch just because of it.
But DVCS is just a bit of complex system to get. "Good UI" in this case is just finding enough common use cases and making them easy that the average mortal won't have to think what commands they type actually do. Case in point:
> Edit: also I know invariably someone will say to make my own Ui instead of complaining. I’ve tried. I’ve done some novel things but it’s really hard to do from a top down level without also rethinking some of the base interaction model. That’s a battle I think needs a lot of effort across the stack first.
as did many other. DVCS is a distributed system(doh) and those generally make reasoning hard for ones not used to thinking that way.
Aside from that I think git would benefit greatly if it had --explain command that would try to explain in human terms what the command you're trying to run actually does
DVCS of any kind just requires certain bottom level of knowledge, if you don't have it you will just get yourself into trouble regardless on how good UI itself is.
Even with some improvements, git UI sucks to this day. Linus didn't care much about the chrome and had a special aversion against anything that smelled of SVN, including the names of the commands that actually made sense. And the worst thing is that Subversion wasn't even half bad - it was just bad for Linux kernel development. Most companies could easily use it today (and some still do).
Additionally, Mercurial with its consistent UI is/was (imnsho) far superior to Git. Git won mostly because GitHub was lightyears ahead of everything else (and in many ways still is), not because git is any way better than hg.