Re: Newbie grief

From: "Michael Witten" <redacted> Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2012 
11:56 PM

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 9:57 PM, Rich Pixley [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

In contrast, I was up and using mercurial in about a day and a half,
including all of the stuff we've discussed, and all of the things I've 
even
read about in git. Learning mq's only took about 20 minutes.

Fortunately, git is based on extremely simple principles.
Unfortunately, git grew out of really bright people hacking stuff
together in order to get sh!t dun; the result is not approachably or
even well documented, the UI is sometimes a bit of a kludge, the API
is probably nonexistent, and the terminology is so loosely thrown
about that it's easy to forget which way is up in discussions.
(Note, though, that Junio has done a laudable job of keeping the
whole experiment going strong).

Having recognized these deficiencies, I suggest that you provide
at least one tiny little use case that doesn't work as you'd
like; it should be in the form of a command line example that we
can all reproduce and discuss precisely.
--

A bit of browsing found 
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/ which 
helped with some of the confusion about the different meanings of "branch". 
It looks like an Hg branch is a Git clone.  Git can be hard work until one 
'gets' how and why the new DVCS approach works. Plus learing the UI.

It is very hard to change one's mindset about how/why/when the old VCS 
approach broke (or isn't). The common VCS approach is based on drawing 
office practices from before the Titanic was built. It is only very recently 
that the reproduction and verification cost for data duplication have 
dropped sufficiently that a DVCS is the better approach. The historical 
approach was to protect the single 'master' item (with lots of admin & 
process). Now it's about 'status accounting' - do I have the right copy at 
the right status - i.e. the declared master sha1.

Philip