Wednesday, August 27. 2008
Why I Don't Like git
I've got some code checked out with git-svn, and I'd like to do two things: pull in new revisions and push up my local revisions. Pretty simple, brainless, thing, right? But we're dealing with git, so of course not 
# Fortunately I'm smart enough to remember that when you
# want to push changes to SVN, you've obviously got to use:
$ git-svn dcommit
...
$
# Hurra! It worked! (at least I think...)
# Now for the next feat, pulling in more revisions...
$ git svn
...
fetch Download new revisions from SVN
...
# Phew! That looks like exactly what I need... Maybe it's not so tricky after all!
$ git svn fetch
A basie/a3c/admin.py
r13 = 45f5309121a77f33f8bd87009671727c0e2dc4a5 (zuze)
# Sweet! Now I can take a look at what has been changed
$ cat basie/a3c/admin.py
cat: basie/a3c/admin.py: No such file or directory
# Hu? I thought I just fetched it...
# Crap, right! I'm NOT supposed to use fetch, I'm supposed to use 'rebase'
# (not, of course, that I understand why "pulling in new revisions from SVN
# is equivilent to a mung-your-history-rebase... But that's ok, I guess)
$ git svn rebase
...
$ cat basie/a3c/admin.py
cat: basie/a3c/admin.py: No such file or directory
# Blast. That didn't work either.
# Right, that's because 'fetch' updates the git repository but not the
# working tree... Alright, let's try an update
$ git up
git: 'up' is not a git-command. See 'git --help'.
# Crap, right, git is too cool to have 'update'... I think I need reset
$ git reset
docs/cmdline.wiki: needs update
# hhmm... Why is it telling me that the files I edited need update?
# And how on earth do I update them?
# I give up 
Can someone smarter than I am tell me what to do?
I guess I'll go back to Bazaar... It may be slow as molasses on a cold day, but at least it is simple enough that mere mortals can use it without resorting to Google.
If you look at the output from git svn fetch you might notice:
r13 = 45f5309 (zuze)
That (zuze) marker tells you what branch the new patch belongs to. Right now you're on master, so of course you can't see code that's only on the zuze branch.
Check out git branch -r to see all the remote branches, and use git checkout zuze to switch to that branch.
zuze is a remote branch, which means that you can't commit changes to it (I think, I'm not at my machine right now so I can't check). If you wanted to make changes, you would create a new local branch that tracks the remote branch: git checkout -b remotes/zuze.
And git-svn uses rebase because:
- If it merged local and upstream changes, subversion would have no idea what was going on.
- If you have local patches, you don't need or want the merge commit anyways; rebase tells git to pop your patches out of the old tree, add the new upstream changes to your repo, and reapply your local changes.
You don't like git because you are using it wrong and don't care to learn the right way?
Check any git-svn tutorial.
What you want is git-svn rebase, not fetch.
Zuzel: mmm I hadn't though of using git-stash -- I'll try that the next time everything explodes.
Jeff: Ah, ok -- that makes sense. I've just fiddled around with git branch and that's making a bit more sense. I think I'm starting to understand why it needs to use rebase, too... But that will take a 12 hour plane trip to think over.
Felipe: Yup Well, sort of. I don't like it because it makes more complex workflows (eg, as Jeff mentioned, push some changes over to SVN while ignoring others) easier at the expense of complicating simple workflows (eg, with svk I can simply remember revision numbers, where with git I'd either need to remember the delta (eg HEAD~10) or the SHA hash)... And since the majority of the things I use version control for are simple, I don't like the extra complexity.
For example, to perform the same set of actions in Bazaar, I sit around waiting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H can use exactly the same commands I would use when I'm dealing with a native bzr repository (eg, bzr co svn://..../; bzr commit (which can either commit locally or commit then push to SVN), bzr push, what have you).
Anyway, thanks for the suggestions -- I'll keep playing around, and maybe one day I'll understand how to rebase the index packs from master into remote...
You don't like git because you don't like git-svn? Don't knock a system 'til you've used it properly
Oh, don't worry...
Since I wrote this article I've found many more reasons to dislike git 
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