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Comment by gregw2 | Hacker News Reader

I have gotten jaded about ESR, but this post was spot on and had an awkward but effective mix of respect, flattery, warning/rebuke, care.

Linus's subsequent wildly successful development of git makes them both look shrewd.

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git was wildly successful, yes, but it still has hints of what esr was talking about. once you step out of the clone/checkout/commit/push loop, git is extremely thorny for people who aren't "with it."

Where I program, we still use subversion and, looking at the costs of migration, we decided not to move to git. The time and effort needed for that migration just couldn't be justified.

I wish that my employer would ditch git and go back to subversion. The use of git is a source of unending problems.

Care to explain a few?

Most of the problems fall into two categories: merging and branching, both of which have repeatedly led to angst and strife to various degrees. There's also the problem of squashing leading to a loss of historical data, and we can't seem to get people to stop squashing.

Subversion results in far fewer problems in these areas. Given that, in our use case, git brings nothing that subversion doesn't, I would greatly prefer to use the system that leads to less issues and greater productivity.

Please note that I'm not saying that git is bad in some kind of overarching sense. It just brings trouble in our use case.

It's a shame ESR is insane. I gave up on him a few years back when he published on his blog clearly premeditated intent to shoot people he didn't like.

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