Comments on: git part 5910

By: amx

amx — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:43:38 +0000

@marius, thanks, I just learned something… It looks like it’s just standard POSIX usage for programs to do that.

By: Brandon (dotsony)

Brandon (dotsony) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:16:18 +0000

I have a love-hate relationship with git. On the one hand it’s better than the competition. On the other hand it’s completely frustrating to use. Learning each operation always seem to be fraught with pitfalls. Until you have had a lot of practice, you think you are doing one thing and find, after viewing the changes with some kind of visualization tool that you have done something else entirely. There’s something fundamentally counter-intuitive about git.

By: Jiri Lebl

Jiri Lebl — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:35:54 +0000

git is an elaborate plot to redefine every possible word. It is designed to insult the users intelligence by showing them how unworthy they are because they clearly do not understand most of the things that git is doing. Git should be used mainly when version control is more important than coding on the project that you are trying to version control. Its priorities are completely screwed up.

Another example is when you do a “git pull” … git will spew a bunch of technical nonsense that is entirely useless for your work, such as technical details of how it transferred things, while at the same time it does NOT tell you something useful such as which files it updated and which you should go look at.

I pine for the days of cvs. CVS sucked, but it sucked in a simple, well defined way, that was rather easy to grasp. CVS was stupid, but it didn’t feel the need keep telling me how much smarter it is than whatever I am coding on.

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 22:51:27 +0000

amx, the shell does not interpret ‘–’, programs interpret that themselves.

By: Jan Schmidt

Jan Schmidt — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 22:23:40 +0000

I think you’re an idiot! For completely unrelated reasons though *nod*

By: Claudio

Claudio — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:43:56 +0000

I don’t know you, but I love the tab-completion feature.

By: Jeremie

Jeremie — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:04:16 +0000

My git does say that the — is optional (git version 1.7.0.4):

git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] []
git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [-b ] []
git checkout [-f|--ours|--theirs|-m|--conflict=] [] [--] …
git checkout –patch [] [--] [...]

By: Benjamin Otte

Benjamin Otte — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:01:08 +0000

I do agree with you 100%.
It’s a bug that I believe is due to history, git checkout started out as a tool to checkout files, but then merged into what it is now: A tool to switch branches. And in that process, someone forgot to fix the error messages. I suspect it’s because everyone close to git knows what the message means, so we just resolve that text to “you made a typo” automatically.

PS: git has a tool to figure out typos (try running “git difff”), it should use it here. So if you file a bug about it, please include that.

By: Casey Dahlin

Casey Dahlin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:59:11 +0000

There’s a lot of defensiveness among git’s userbase, but having lurked the development list for awhile, I can honestly say that patches for issues like this get written, and they get taken. Especially for an error message tweak I’d say if its worth ranting about its probably worth sending a patch, or even just a “wouldn’t it be better if git did x instead of y” mail.

Again, with the way so many of the users get so defensive about git I understand why most developers feel like they shouldn’t bother just offering up quick patches or suggestions when git frustrates them, but when you look at the actual core git developers the situation is a lot friendlier.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:20:23 +0000

“Any other vcs would have told me that the thing I’m trying to get does not exist.”

Sounds like it would have sufficed to change the original error:

error: pathspec ‘redland_bindings_1_0_7_1′ did not match any file(s) known to git.

to something more general:

error: ‘redland_bindings_1_0_7_1′ did not match any branch, tag, commit, or file known to git.