Stan whines about Git again

For the past year or so, I’ve been using Git daily. Remember when I wrote that could lead to reevaluation of some of my comments? Let’s see if that checks out.

Expectations vs. reality

It turns out Git can handle non-text stuff relatively okay. It understandably needs some help with merging it, and yes, you can set it up so that this happens automatically. This does not really help with chicken and egg problem, but it’s something.

The Windows-related conundrums should really be evaluated separately. Interestingly, I’ve tried to avoid using Windows at work when possible due to, uhm, corporate systems slowing down absolutely everything, so the part where Git works better on Linux may have been an advantage. Usage of filesystem as database has… disadvantages, but things could be worse. The tool separation? That part causes real problems. Most often, a separate tool updates and I don’t realize that affects Git in some (presumably negative) way. SSH is somewhat stable; GPG loves to change key formats for unknown reasons.

Rebases are as annoying as I expected them to. When your boss doesn’t use them, everything is fine. When your boss uses them, things go awry. Thankfully, the part about your boss wanting you to rebase stuff can be relatively painless thanks to temporary branches.

New stuff

Well.

Merging conundrums

This has as much to do with Git as with indentation in general, but some relatively trivial merges fail because of the two being involved. Throw an automatic linting tool which likes to align stuff into the mix and this stops being theoretical. Granted, that’s also on the tool, but it’s annoying and makes me wish for binary source code again.

Worktrees and submodules

This is a legitimate bug brought out of design scope extension. Basically, two of major powerful Git features happen to be incompatible with each other, and no one cares. No one cares, because top Git users don’t really use worktrees, which is at least in part because they’re incompatible with submodules. Chicken, anyone?

However, submodules are not that big of a deal, because of…

Customizations specific to huge users

The really huge players in the development league deploy their own “enhancements” to submodule system. Most notably, Google has came up with some “gclient” thing, which… I do not exactly understand what is it that it does differently than submodules would. This would be a good moment to attack Google for doing such things, since they really like customizing everything, but in this case, they’re not alone. What is particularly apathy inducing is that maybe some of those customizations just smooth things out and stock Git is enough to handle related projects, but good luck figuring out which ones are those and which ones are more complex without wasting loads of time.

Summary

No. Just no.