Why I Don't Hate Git: Hidden Consistency

Git for me is an interesting topic. I used it initially when git had no UI and cogito was still a thing. I can't say I enjoyed using it much. At the time I did all my development tasks with SVN and the world was good. A little while later I played around with mercurial and instantly fell in love. I held onto mercurial for a long time and defended it vigorously. Only in 2008 did I finally start to use git and it took me multiple attempts until I was convinced that I should migrate my repositories from mercurial to git.

Git's Horrible UI I suppose anyone who comes from any version control system to git will be quickly surprised by its utter lack of consistency in the UI. Steve Losh famously made fun of this in his git koans. However every time this topic comes up I am a bit in disbelief because I don't remember the git UI confusing in daily operations. Sure enough, for whatever reason git remote works different from git branch and git tag for some reason but given that I also use them in a different way I would not even make that association. The only git command I actually remember being odd is git show which has a bit of an unfamiliar syntax for exploring object contents. Yet at the same time I remember fighting against Mercurial very commonly and I have a very strained relationship with perforce, but I can't remember many cases where I had issues with git. Why do I not hate git the same way?

Learning the UI vs the Concept Thinking about this a bit more I think the reason git resonates so well with me is because I learned git differently than any other version control system. With mercurial and perforce you learn the UI and you learn how to solve some specific problems with it with the consequences or implementations of those actions being a mystery. With git on the other hand even the first page of the tutorial has a direct link to the internals chapter of the git book which explains the internal implementation of git. This was even more the case in the past when git did not even have a UI. As a user you were expected to work with some of the files in the .git folder yourself! I remember playing around in the very early days with git where there was not even a way to commit. The .git/HEAD was still a symlink to the current branch and a documented way to commit was this dance: echo "Commit message" | git-commit-tree $( git-write-tree ) > .git/HEAD Only later an alias for commit was added, and even then the tutorial was still … rough I would say. Git didn't start as a version control system, it started as a concept that other tools could use to build a version control system on top. And this set a very different tone for how it developed than many other systems. Surely git changed over the last 10 years and some concepts were changed, but in the grand scheme of things it has not changed much. There is a certain beauty in being able to create a repository in git from 2005, doing another commit with git from 2015, doing another commit with git from 2005 and looking at the resulting log with git from 2015. The core concept of git has not changed. Of course the UI is something you need to learn to work with git, but because you can learn the underlying concept of git, the UI fades largely into the background.

Good Defaults Git might not have the best UI, but it has good defaults and they are getting better over time. Things look nice by default, the common behavior is in general the default and if it is not, there will at least be a discussion about changing it. There is one blessed way to do something and it's easy to learn. Branching in git has never changed, knowledge acquired ten years ago is just as valid today.

A Solid Design Ultimately I think Linus when he created git as a version control system made an ungodly good design and very little change was necessary. Sure, some details had to change later, but the core of it was good. Working with commits and objects turned out to be the right way and the branching clearly was always the right decision. Even mercurial had to eventually concede and is now warning when you create a named branch :) I learned the git concepts once and now I can use this thing. Sure, sometimes I need to google a rarely used command, but when it really matters, I do not need to. There has never been a situation where I failed so badly that I could not recover from it. And this beautiful and simple concept makes up for a lot of inconsistent UI. Where the UI lacks consistency and maybe simplicity, the core design of git has both. I value this a ton.

Git Is There For Me That ultimately is the reason why I forgive git's UI a lot and why I recollect very few frustrating experiences is because when it really matters, git has always been on my side. I screwed up really badly before, merging wrong things together, accidentally deleting data and much more, yet I never lost any data or felt left abandoned by my tool. When I fail, sometimes I make a copy of my .git folder and carefully trace back on what I did wrong. This is where git shines. There are very few problems you cannot recover from. On the other hand I have horrible memories of me making mistakes in other version control systems where it was either impossible or required the assistance of a developer of such system to get out of my misery. Neither did it break because I misused it nor did it broke out of its own volition. I can't say the same thing about any other version control system I used. I successfully broke many subversion checkouts (even destroyed the database on the server), screwed up perforce workspaces and entire mercurial repositories. The worst that ever happened to me using git is that my Flask repositories for all eternity will contain some bad file permissions on old tree records due to a temporary github bug.