Re: GIT vs Other: Need argument

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007, Guilhem Bonnefille wrote:

Yes, but I think that, as Git has ton more capabilities, user has to
understand more things than with CVS.

I do agree.

The whole "branch" thing is something you can ignore in CVS, but it's 
simply very hard to ignore in git, because even *if* you just follow 
another repository, git kind of forces you to be aware of the difference 
between "local branch" and "remote tracking branch".

I think that's fairly fundamental to being distributed, though. 

I don't know lot of corporate teams, but here, our developers are
REALLY not motivated by VCS. It's only a way to share work. And I'm
not talking about concurrent modification: lot of people in my office
really think that the better model is the locked one.

Sure. At one level they may even be right. It's just that the locked model 
obviously doesn't work past a certain scenario. But explaining that to 
somebody who doesn't even think outside his own scenario is pointless.

So no question: git has a level of abstraction and perhaps requires a 
higher-level view than RCS and CVS do. And I can well imagine that it is 
seen as more "difficult" because of that.

I just haev to say that I worked with CVS at a commercial company for 
seven years, and I *did* do things like branches and merges etc, and 
despite workign with it at that level (not that I was the expert by any 
means: we had a person who came in with the main job literally being the 
tools around CVS to make branching more convenient etc), I seriously feel 
that CVS was a *lot* harder to get into than it is to get into git.

So for such people, I really think raw Git is much more complicated
than CVS/SVN.

I do wonder what we could do about that. I think you can use git in the 
"SVN tracker only" model, and I really thought it was pretty damn simple, 
but ...

		Linus