RFC: migrating to git

[Tim Chevalier]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree with Malcolm (and with Neil's later post); I wanted to issue a
me-too because of all of the pro-git messages I've been seeing. I've
been using git for two years at my job. I still can't do anything but
the most basic tasks. When I try to read the documentation, the
documentation (a) is incomprehensible and (b) tells me that I'm stupid
because I find it incomprehensible. I found darcs easy to learn and it
has always made sense to me. I've lost work and had to recreate it by
hand because of git.

I've only ever been an occasional GHC contributor, so my opinion
shouldn't count for much, but a switch to git would be one more small
thing that would discourage me from contributing in the future.

Cheers,
Tim

-- 
Tim Chevalier * http://cs.pdx.edu/~tjc/ * Often in error, never in doubt
"an intelligent person fights for lost causes,realizing that others
are merely effects" -- E.E. Cummings