Why git is better than X | Hacker News Reader

Why git is better than X

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8 pointsptarjan12 comments

I more or less settled on git, but I think he's being glib with some of these points. For instance 'easy to use': many git commands require --funky 'options' -t -o get the desired results, whereas that's rarer with svn and systems that have taken that approach.

Also, I found that finding out what those funky options are is less than intuitive and not very well documented.

yeah, git documentation does suck .. but you can find most things on http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ and example based things on http://gitready.com/

the majority of commands you use (clone, pull, push, branch, add) dont require many options at all .. -a -m -b ..

Of course if you're doing something elaborate then you will get some random options like -soft or --before="yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm" .. those are generally things you can't do in svn ..

edit: I forgot to mention that good guis like gitx do most of these things for you

> the majority of commands you use (clone, pull, push, branch, add) dont require many options at all .. -a -m -b ..

It's not that bad, no, but with svn, I almost never had to use an option to the commands. My impression is that hg and bzr have followed svn's footsteps and have slightly nicer interfaces. That said, I'm relatively happy with git, but I view it as just a tool and not something to get too excited about:-)

This would be vastly improved if Git's documentation and help system wasn't so incomplete, out of date, convoluted, and messy. Git has an incredibly rich featureset, but the documentation often falls down in highlighting the 99% use cases so it ends up with a steeper learning curve than many other SCMs. I think this is one reason why Mercurial is so popular, at the scale of most development projects the advantages of Git over Mercurial are not terribly significant, but Mercurial has much, much better help and tutorials.

I'd rather have things more complex and have the ability, than simpler and not. By that argument we should all use horse carts instead of cars.

Cars are far easier to drive, and maintain, than a horse cart.

Github - really? I just can't imagine Github being nearly as important to git adoption as some of those other points. It's a slow, clunky interface to a fast VCS.

Has darcs just disappeared off the radar? I'm using it for all my projects, though I'm not sharing wih anyone else, so I've never come under pressure to switch.

There is some interesting discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381920

My take from that chart is that if git was actually easy to use, it would be as good as svn. whoopee!

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