You can no longer afford not to take Git seriously | Hacker News Reader

You can no longer afford not to take Git seriously

jamesmckay.net

16 pointszachwill7 comments

As one of the corporate developers mentioned in the blog post, I had recently independently been getting the feeling that I will not be able to avoid learning git much longer. Some open source packages I've used go as far as only providing links to github without direct downloads. So far, every time I end up on github, I feel completely lost. This must be what getting left behind feels like.

Learning enough git to get by takes all of 5 minutes. There's little excuse to not learn it from a consumer perspective these days.

To be literal about it, as far as I can tell, it takes at least 5 minutes to figure out which version of git to install. So far msys send seems to be winning.

Github allows direct downloads: https://github.com/<path_to_repo>/zipball/<branc...;

Git is amazing but I take issue with GitHub. The point of Git is that it's a distributed and decentralized version control system and GitHub gets rid of the decentralized part of that. That is counter to what Git was designed for.

Github doesn't compromise the distributed nature of git. It makes it easier to use it as a traditional client-server SCM, but you can treat Github as just another remote (and I often do!)

For people coming from client-server SCMs, I think Github is a really important transition step, and frankly, as an open source developer and consumer, it's really nice that there's a popular publish/find-stuff hub.

GitHub (and the Mac/Windows clients they publish that work against non-Github git repos as well as GitHub ones) is probably a huge part of the reason Git has 27.6% of the "market" in the first place.

In fact, I think the blog post here reaches the wrong conclusion, in that everything he thought about using git is actually (still) true, but it is widely successful anyway because of other projects (mostly related directly to GitHub) which hide the complexity of git from the "9-5" developers.

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