1) Like Linux, git is technically extremely awesome…

2) … “under the hood”. But also like Linux, it fails on understanding the unfortunate low motivation or intelligence (or both) of the real world user base, and fails to understand that ramp-up time and productivity are king. For example, I’m spending my weekend now powering my way through the documentation and trial-and-error, setting up gitosis, getting the highly un-intuitive egit eclipse plugin to work, etc. Now, mind you I will get there soon enough, but I would much rather be doing something else like coding on something I actually care about, but actually I’m more or less ok with this part because the software is free and I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

3) However – now here’s the fun part folks. After setting all this up at work, instead of doing what I get paid for (writing code), I will get to spend hours step-by-step walk through each of the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers (RAIDs) I work with on how to use this toolset. I know this because I already went through it with SVN. To 90% of the RAID drones that work at any decent-paying company, documentation is like some kind of kryptonite. Instead of going through this painful process also, or using that mysterious web site (google), they would rather just, “Hey can you…” or “How do I…” when it comes to creating branches or merging their own code. So, I then get appointed to be the “branch manager” and the “merge gimp”. Jeez it’s bad enough I already have to dick around with maven on everybody’s machine 3 times a day because the eclipse plugin can’t maintain project state correctly.

4) Reality: Git was designed for Linux kernel developers, who generally have more going on upstairs than 90% of the corporate drones who have a very simple and limited workflow:
— checkout / setup project
— implement code changes
— test their crap
— check it in
— if there is a branch, merge – hopefully in some way that sucks less than svn

… which by the way implies a need for about 4 commands for the common use case. Most developers have a very average level of intelligence (not being condescending here, but by definition, most of anything is average). Its probably more of just trying to get their actual job done rather than screw around with tools that are not intuitive. Rebase and cherry-pick are great features, but I’m telling you the drones won’t use them unless a tool can dumb it down much more than git does. I’m thinking maybe something on the level of a video-game for 9 to 14 year olds might work.

5) No, Hg and Bzr don’t handle the workflow much better, these systems really all just copy features from one another as far as I can tell with some trivial variation.

6) To summarize, here are my general interface design questions:

— Why so many steps? Why do changes need to be add’ed, then committed, then push’ed when one command will do? Don’t tell me it is so you can work offline, if you are offline, it could just queue things locally, while of course gently reminding the drone that he needs to get connected at some point to get the changes upstream. Git confuses working offline/offline with the user workflow itself here.

– Clone vs Pull vs Fetch? Huh…? Dude, seriously its one command to update from server to my machine.

— Why just allow a random email to be entered? In a corporate environment that makes it a hard sell for obvious reasons. Of course you are going to make all the obvious kumbaya answers about “Well, if you can’t trust developers blah blah” and I both get it and agree with you. However (again, reality) is that sometimes (not often, but sometimes) bad drones to dumb or evil things — hence the need for a thing called real security. Of course I don’t want to hear romance stories about how you spent a weekend hacking it to do X or Y… I have a real life.

To reiterate – not knocking git technically in terms of nuts and bolts, it is quite awesome — DAGs and all. But maybe another layer of scripts can be put on top of it to make it usable (call it gitiot, maybe… or gittyup… or gitter-dun?).

Anyhoo… as much as SVN merges drive me nuts and I would love to use anything else… I’ll probably sticking with SVN at the corporate drone contracts and maybe using git or Hg for my personal projects.

On the other hand I find git very intuitive, it gets out of my way (as all good tools should) and it’s blindingly fast.

Bzr is a straight up POS, but I expect nothing more from a distro with a community composed largely from people like this: http://omgubuntu.co.uk

Any preteen-mentality (pretend-mentality?) Anonymous Coward who signs itself ‘lol’ and begins its comment ‘lol’ should automatically be ignored. I propose a patch to the WordPress comment system, such that
– the trigraph ‘lol’, upper or lower case, in the ‘name’ area causes the message to be deleted and the originating IP to be blocked from all WP sites; and
– any comment containing two or more of said trigraph in the comment text triggers the same treatment.