RFC: migrating to git

[Malcolm Wallace]

On 10 Jan 2011, at 14:02, Gregory Collins wrote:
> +1. I don't have a lot of skin in this particular game (I'm not
> currently a GHC contributor and am unlikely to become one in the near
> future), but I can offer some anecdotal evidence:

As another non-GHC contributor, my opinion should probably also count  
for little, but my experience with git has been poor.

I have used git daily in my job for the last year.  Like Simon PJ, I  
struggle to understand the underlying model of git, despite reading  
quite a few tutorials.  I have a high failure rate with attempting  
anything beyond the equivalents of darcs record, push, and pull.

When I use darcs, my local workflow typically involves lots of amend- 
record, cherry-picking, and multiple repos/branches.  I have tried to  
do these things in git a few times and failed miserably.  I am an old- 
fashioned unix command-line lover, but I find using the git command- 
line is next to impossible, and as a consequence do almost everything  
in git gui.  If the gui interface does not let me do an action, then I  
often can't work out how to do it at all, even after googling.

Mind you, some other people at work somehow manage to use git's  
support for branching reasonably successfully.  But we have occasional  
mishaps where a repo is made totally unusable by somebody making a  
tiny mistake with their branching commands.  Our standard advice at  
work for people who get their repo muddled is to throw it away, re- 
clone the master, and manually re-code their local changes from  
scratch (with the help of diff).

If I were considering contributing minor patches to a project, the use  
of git would probably not deter me too much - I can cope with the  
simple stuff.  But if I wanted more major involvement, git would  
definitely cause me to think twice about whether to bother.

Regards,
     Malcolm