develop7

> Google stuff as you go.

Are you implying git man pages are useless to newcomer?

Yup, instead of pushing git core devs into adopting at least mercurial "phases" concept or thinking on another way to solve this problem, reposting "do not handle it this way" guidelines is preferred.

> _the missing piece that keeps this from being useful is that they can't keep their fork up to date using github.com_

yep, a year ago removed "Fork Queue" would come in handy there.

Why exactly should I learn how git works? Other DVCS (yes, they do exist!) do not require me to learn their guts to be used effectively — only read man pages. Which, in case of git, are "one big almighty “fuck you”" (© Steve Bennett) — useless for end user (not git developer).

I'm pretty much aware of semantic model of distributed version control. Problem is git introduces new concepts (useless outside of git) which are widely used with and without cause.

Check out various short descriptions of push command:

* git — "Update remote refs along with associated objects"

* mercurial — "push changes to the specified destination"

* bzr — "Update a mirror of this branch"

* veracity — "Push committed changes to another repository instance"

* fossil — "Push changes in the local repository over into a remote repository"

As you may want to see, all of them except first one, are easily readable even by person used some VCS before. But not git — to understand what push command does, you have to have gitglossary opened in front of you.

> All DVCS systems involve creating and editing a series of changes to a directory tree

git is not — it stores only snapshots and changes are calculated every time you want to see them.

> the revision history is a document that you're trying to edit.

It is revision history, not "a document". To be precise, in DVCS it is directed (except darcs) acyclic graph, aka DAG of source code revisions.

> Those concepts map directly to the HTML wire format, so in practice, you'll end up learning that

One and only VCS (of 7 I have used) I've ended up learning guts was Git.

> They're easier to use for beginners, but they're more fragile and their internal formats are more obscure.

Which way are they fragile exactly? Could you please back this statement up with some examples?

And why one should care about VCS internals unless he's VCS (plugin) developer?

Of course, all they had to read and follow was "contributing to sqlalchemy" manual.

> you weren't properly taught how git actually works

I'm using git (well, forced to, in fact) since 2009 and I've learned its' guts. And I still can't see why should I care of .git contents unless I'm git developer.

Ask yourself this: how come mercurial/bzr/fossil/veracity users aren't aware of those DVCS' internals?

1. What a huge saving — 0,002¢ per repo copy. Don't spend it all in one place.

2. Bookmarks is core feature since March 2011. This basically means those who pushed "move to Git" decision, haven't checked if anything was updated in Mercurial (and with bookmarks in particular) since then at least. This is pretty understandable — it is known that only software gets updated is one you're paying attention to, others don't.

3. As ezquerra mentioned, those extensions Mike is probably referring to, are shipped with Mercurial, and are enabled with only single line added to .hgrc. Not mentioning those extensions do not _emulate_ Git features, they _reproduce_ it.

4. Only reason makes sense.

Well, git sucks a lot, but switch to CVCS instead? No way.

No, git doesn't track renames — git _guesses_ them

Create a pull request to https://bitbucket.org/sjl/stevelosh

> git is only used by expert users

1 235 026 expert users, my eye

It's v27.something-dev.

well, in fact they do support it — there's Widevine plugin in chrome://plugins/ (/opt/google/chrome/libwidevinecdmadapter.so)

> The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have /, as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory.

Mercurial had this for ages.

is there a complete list of ways I should avoid to hold git?

"avoid holding it that way"?

You're doing everything wrong. Literally everything.