Git 2.33 Released With New "merge-ort" Merging For 500~9000x Speed-Up

[Vorpal]

With regards to the usability of git, I can recommend some GUIs to make what is going on more visual. Unfortunately neither of my recommendations are open source, and only free as in beer for non-commercial users.

The first is GitKraken, which is easy to use and work acceptably for smaller projects. Downsides is that it doesn't scale to large repos (multi GB, 10k+ revisions). Also keybindings are not rebindable and suck on Swedish keyboards.

The other option, and the one I use nowadays, is SmartGit. It scales well, is customisable and have a lot of features. The GUI can however be a bit overwhelming at first. I recommend selecting the log graph view as the default view in the setup wizard (NOT the default setting).

Both of these work on Linux. I have tested things like gitk etc and found them to basically be jokes. I have not tested Github Desktop or any other options that don't work on Linux.

[discordian]

How horrible it must've been if there was room for this much improvement? Lol

Just to think that it still did beat anything else when it comes to merges. I remember some merges taking 1.5 hours with svn, and if your connection was flimsy you might had to take multiple tries. That bar was ridiculous low

[discordian]

With regards to the usability of git, I can recommend some GUIs to make what is going on more visual. Unfortunately neither of my recommendations are open source, and only free as in beer for non-commercial users.

The first is GitKraken, which is easy to use and work acceptably for smaller projects. Downsides is that it doesn't scale to large repos (multi GB, 10k+ revisions). Also keybindings are not rebindable and suck on Swedish keyboards.

The other option, and the one I use nowadays, is SmartGit. It scales well, is customisable and have a lot of features. The GUI can however be a bit overwhelming at first. I recommend selecting the log graph view as the default view in the setup wizard (NOT the default setting).

Both of these work on Linux. I have tested things like gitk etc and found them to basically be jokes. I have not tested Github Desktop or any other options that don't work on Linux.

Well, I can add Sublime Merge to the list (commercial, free trial I think). Its not that I find git particularly had to use, that is until merge conflicts happen.
Sublime Merge has hands-down the best UI for that, I never knew with the other clients what was ours/theirs or how to see the common base (pre-merge).

[Vorpal]

Cool, haven't tried Sublime Merge really. Wasn't around when I settled on SmartGit.

I use an external diff/merge tool though: Beyond Compare 4 Pro. There is a 30 day trial and it isn't cheap. But it is the best merge tool I used. Quite often it even figures it out on its own and I just have to verify and click Save.

[Vistaus]

Yeah, I think Git ought to be able to be usable by people who are not software developers. Example maybe there are guys who write technical documentation but are not developers. Maybe even things that has nothing to do with software, such as blogs, wikis, books, novels, etc.

I'm not a software developer or any developer for that matter, yet I find the basics of Git easy to use.

[AndyChow]

I'm sorry, but that is in fact subjective.
May I ask what specifically you find "unfriendly" or confusing? And compared to what? Perhaps I can help. One thing I do know new users sometimes find confusing is the nomenclature used like "checkout" for both switching to a branch and also restoring staged changes etc. That has in fact been improved in newer versions of git where the command "switch" is now recommended for switching between branches and the command "restore" is now recommended for restoring from changes and staged files.




I don't know if a source control management system will ever be used by anyone. Do you have a specific kind of user in mind? I mean git is already used by the vast majority of software developers out there. What other use cases do you have in mind?

My experience with git has been 100%:



It's a frequent problem that you can't even easily discard your changes and just get a fresh copy of the project (like coming back from vacation). Couldn't they have put in a force switch like "git pull -f"? Clean and reset don't always work. Sometimes you really have to nuke your git folder and clone the whole project fresh. It happened to me with Chia in the last month, so no these aren't long ago fixed issues I'm imagining.

[jntesteves]

but I really would like to see something very simple and easy to use that would strive to make Git usable for anyone, not just nerds.

Git isn't for "nerds", it's a software configuration management system, a tool for software developers. You got to be a software developer (not a "nerd") to benefit from it.

Anyway, git is definitely not state-of-the-art anymore, and I hope it'll soon be replaced by better tools for the job. In the meantime we have SmartGit, which makes it very easy and I can't imagine using Git without it anymore. Maybe that's what you've been looking for.

[uid313]

Both of these work on Linux. I have tested things like gitk etc and found them to basically be jokes. I have not tested Github Desktop or any other options that don't work on Linux.

There is also a GTK-based client named gitg.
GitHub Desktop isn't available officially for Linux but it is possible to run it on Linux, there is a fork of it.

https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop#readme

Cool, haven't tried Sublime Merge really. Wasn't around when I settled on SmartGit.

I use an external diff/merge tool though: Beyond Compare 4 Pro. There is a 30 day trial and it isn't cheap. But it is the best merge tool I used. Quite often it even figures it out on its own and I just have to verify and click Save.

There is also GTK-based diff application called Meld.
There is also the Windows application WinMerge which can you probably run through Wine.
There is also kdiff3.

I'm not a software developer or any developer for that matter, yet I find the basics of Git easy to use.

So what do you use Git for?
I can do simple things such as clone a repository, commit to the local repository, push the commits, and pull commits.
But I don't know anything about tagging, undoing, rebasing, merging, rolling back, etc.

My experience with git has been 100%:

Yes, that has been my experience too. I really would like to like Git though.

Git isn't for "nerds", it's a software configuration management system, a tool for software developers. You got to be a software developer (not a "nerd") to benefit from it.

Anyway, git is definitely not state-of-the-art anymore, and I hope it'll soon be replaced by better tools for the job. In the meantime we have SmartGit, which makes it very easy and I can't imagine using Git without it anymore. Maybe that's what you've been looking for.

Well even many software developers struggle with Git.

[Vistaus]

Anyway, git is definitely not state-of-the-art anymore, and I hope it'll soon be replaced by better tools for the job.

By what tools, exactly? It's not like the competition is so state-of-the-art either. Subversion, CVS, Bazaar, Mercurial… maybe some of them have a few pros over Git, but none of them are state-of-the-art (anymore).

[jntesteves]

By what tools, exactly? It's not like the competition is so state-of-the-art either. Subversion, CVS, Bazaar, Mercurial… maybe some of them have a few pros over Git, but none of them are state-of-the-art (anymore).

Most of my development workflows involve maintaining downstream patches. With the big move to FOSS by most companies, I believe this trend will be the rule going forward, because FOSS is all about quick forking and slow convergence. Problem is, Git was never meant for this, it has precarious (hacks) support for working with patches. Git's main work artifact is the snapshot, instead. A few tries have been made at VCS over a sound theory of patches, the most well-known being Darcs, but due to poor performance never saw mainstream adoption. The current most advanced initiative in this direction is Pijul, I believe.