Comments on: Revision Control Systems suck

By: Koe

Koe — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:23:10 +0000

How about a RCS (CVS, SVN, Git, Bzr, Mircurial) that is integrated into GNOME? *gasp*, oh wait, why should it be so incredibly easy to program using a GUI and have GNOME track your changes, only making you hit a simple button like ‘push’ or ‘upload’…

If life were only that easy.

It’s almost like programmers like doing things the hard way… at least on Linux.

By: User Interface Design: the Command Line « UNIX Administratosphere

User Interface Design: the Command Line « UNIX Administratosphere — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:02:34 +0000

[...] As an example of what seems to be a colossal user interface failure – including poor writing – consider these articles from Scott Remnant which are absolutely a gem (albeit from way back in February 2009). He wrote an article titled Git Sucks – which was then followed by a second and then a third – followed by yet another titled Revision Control Systems Suck. [...]

By: philwilson.org » Blog Archive » Bazaar and Git

philwilson.org » Blog Archive » Bazaar and Git — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:19:39 +0000

[...] There’s some interesting commentary on revision control systems as a whole on Revision Control Systems suck. [...]

By: Jakob Eriksson

Jakob Eriksson — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:32:01 +0000

Aegis is a bit heavy weight but it has EVERYTHING, including things like review.

By: JFM

JFM — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:00:39 +0000

“review the changes somebody else’s source code makes to mine”

‘hg incoming’ is good at this; it tells you what changes you’d get by pulling from another repository, optionally showing the patches.

By: nossralf

nossralf — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 10:43:16 +0000

Random thoughts:

Use ZFS and set it up to take snapshots of the directories where you keep source code very frequently. Or like this: hack together an elisp command that saves the file and takes a snapshot after that, bind to C-x C-s, etc. (Possible downside: OS dependencies, though ZFS-on-FUSE exists.)

Write a simple FUSE file system that’s backed by the RCS that you “need” to use (but don’t “want” to). Save = commit, or something.

They’ll be a PITA to create but you’ll be writing code doing it (without RCS if you so choose) and after it’s done you’ll have revision control “for free”.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:14:25 +0000

As a Windows User, I use Tortoise(insert vcs here) to interact with version control systems in my day-to-day. So, you won’t get any command-line kung fu tips from me- I’m just not that cool.

But, I’m certain that it’s a setting of the VCS and *not* the tortoise app, which allows you to choose an external diffing application- That being said, for the “review and accept changes” step that you were saying no VCS handles cleanly, wouldn’t you just specify an external diffing program such as Meld(linux) or WinMerge(windows), which will visually compare the differences and allow you to copy differing regions between files? I confess to having no experience with Git directly, but I have this setting in Hg, and it works quite well.

By: Jakub Narębski

Jakub Narębski — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:38:28 +0000

@Theodore Tso: Since v1.6.1 git-send-email can invoke git-format-patch in background.

(You would still have to configure it to know how to send email… well, if ‘mail’ works, then git-send-email should also work without configuration).

By: Andreia Gaita

Andreia Gaita — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:47:41 +0000

If you hate scm systems, you look like you don’t particularly enjoy IDEs either, you don’t enjoy editors, you don’t like fixing things… it even sounds like you don’t really enjoy typing either. What the heck, now I’m confused, what is it that you like? I always thought coders loved a challenge, but you seem to want to have things popup all done without you having to think or do anything. If you hate scms and don’t really want to have anything to do with them, why the bashing posts about them? The problem is obviously yours and not theirs. Weird

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:13:14 +0000

Dear snarky holier-than-thou Git users,

Responding in a method such as baczek or Hub did above doesn’t really help your cause. Please go read the Linux Advocacy mini-HOWTO, then extrapolate and apply the concepts within.

Love and hugs,
Jeff

P.S., Scott: I actually do enjoy reading these posts of yours on the topic, and appreciate that you’re willing to stick your neck out to flaming asshat trolls in order to voice your opinions. I also enjoy learning from the commentators who do sincerely want to help and have good information to share; thanks to both, and keep it up!

Git is far from my favorite DRCS — I’m a Bazaar fan because I’ve found it to be the most straight-forward and predictable, with Mercurial running a close second — but there are projects that use it with which I want to or have to work, so any information about how to improve its weaknesses and capitalize its strengths is of great value to me.