Comments on: ways in which git makes the opposite of sense to me

By: Ways in which ‘Thomas’ appears the opposite of ’smart’ to me. « noah’s mark

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:51:07 +0000

[...] (original article) [...]

By: git monthly links: 2009-02 « git blog

git monthly links: 2009-02 « git blog — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:39:04 +0000

[...] thomas.apestaart.org » ways in which git makes the opposite of sense to me [...]

By: Just because it’s a command line tool… - glyphobet • глыфобет • γλυφοβετ

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:00:28 +0000

[...] mean the interface has to suck: ways in which git makes the opposite of sense. posted by glyphobet reddit_url=’http://glyphobet.net/blog/blurb/334′ [...]

By: Felipe Contreras

Felipe Contreras — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:25:11 +0000

For the record, I’ve sent a series of patches that make ‘git config’ more user friendly, and now I’ve learned about parseopt, which is a utility that was introduced at some point in git. It makes the usage output look much nicer, and -h works with that.

Not all the UI has migrated to to parseopt, but eventually it might happen, if people send patches for that.

By: Spudd86

Spudd86 — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:56:08 +0000

Also most of those 139 commands are not meant to be used directly by human users, but exist for scripting git and for other parts of git to call out to

By: Spudd86

Spudd86 — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:41:16 +0000

Actually Exhibit F is the tutorial’s fault not git’s

in git commit -a the -a means all if you want to give it a list of things to commit just do
git commit [stuff]

git commit -a is ‘commit all tracked files that have changed’ so git is correct in saying that paths don’t make sense when it is given

so really git commit can function as ‘commit the stuff I added’ when run with no arguments, or ‘add and commit these files’ when you git a list of stuff or it can do ‘commit all the tracked files with changes’ if you give it -a

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:08:19 +0000

Git core is really nice, cool and powerful.

But UI needs redoing from scratch (I prefer svn and/or hg)

Agree about Tk.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 12:21:35 +0000

For what it’s worth, I did the exact same thing with “commit -a”.

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:40:31 +0000

@Alan – Thomas is getting (and deserving) criticism because he’s doing a very poor job of arguing his case, starting with his comments about starting a git-haters blog. If his objective is to point out issues with git, he’s wrapped it up in too much sarcasm, ranting, and seeming ignorance for it to actually serve that objective.

By: John

John — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:54:39 +0000

It looks like most of the errors you’re encountering are because you don’t have any commits in your repository. Git doesn’t give a useful error message about that. I’m not sure why. But, a lot of those bizarre errors you got are because of that. Even your clone error is extra bizarre because there’s no valid HEAD. The “could not describe HEXSTRING” error was for the same reason.

I agree with an earlier post in that you should frame this sort of thing in an “I did this, expected that, and got yonder” manner.

Git obviously needs to be a bit smarter about not-quite-totally-initialized repositories. I know that the reason it doesn’t create such a repository is so you can have the initial commit be an existing set of data, or so that you can rebase your history correctly.