more git learning

So I spent some time I could have spent hacking on genius by reading about git. I think I somewhat understand the way the thing works. What exactly the commands do still remains an enigma and it seems very hard to figure out how to do simple things. Problem is that there is too many states that your changes are in. They are in a dirty tree, then they are in the index (staged?) then you commit them to your local repository then they are published to the main repository.

The bottom up article is pretty good for understanding what’s going on, though many times I’m asking myself “why? why would I ever care?” Git is written by a control freak obsessed with metadata of the changes to the code rather than the changes themselves. For example, it is now easier (though not by much) to split a set of changes into two commits. I think that is not something I have ever ever done, so I can’t mentally justify the added complexity. Git seems like a project that should have been done by somebody doing his phd thesis.

In my view, the fewer branches your project has the more chance you have of understanding what state your code is in. The problem is that changes to code are NEVER local, no matter how good of a programmer you are. Just like every chess book tells you to watch the entire board when making a move, so should every programming book. That’s why you don’t want too many branches and essentially often apply changes that were done to the tree in when it was in a different state. Such patches should be hand checked and hand applied! Git does too much magic like this, plus it by default starts branching the tree whenever you sneeze. Making a new branch should be the last resort unless you have a lot of free time.

My other issue is that it is pretty difficult to get started with git properly, especially on a large project where there is little opportunity for error. That means the startup time for a newcomer is far higher. If this was implemented to make sure more new people join gnome, I think it is seriously misguided. People who are already familiar with git are probably sufficiently at easy with the free software community that they will easily get started. People who just want to fix a few problems in the code and send back patches are going to be overwhelmed by new complexity.