every single article about git comments on this "feature" of git...isnt it time we all removed the aura of geniousness to git and bloody moved on to something better?, (like svn for instance)
- the individual opportunity costs of learning multiple VCSs likely outweigh the cost of learning 1, even if it's suboptimally difficult
- the community-wide leverage lost by having significant fractions of prospective oss devs who aren't comfortable contributing via one VCS or another probably outweighs the marginal leverage lost by alienating the fraction of prospective oss developers that find git unlearnable or oppressive or whatnot
(I am ~fine with breaking the monoculture for a once-a-generation move to a clearly superior model, but there's a risk of fracturing the ecosystem across several VCSs for decades to come.)
For some reason, I never grokked svn. Something about the use of directories as versions always threw me for a loop. Maybe if I spent the time to really learn it I'd like it, but that isn't likely to happen these days.
It was a simple and clever design but it's hard to argue for it when compared distributed nature of git and its ubiquity.