On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 5:50 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:
>> Yes I apologize for that. Git reacted differently than I expected to a
>> "git diff". I have since reposted a proper patch.
>
> mmm ... I've recently been forced into using git for another project,
> and I find myself mystified as to why anyone would want to use it.
> Seems like baroqueness and unexpected behaviors are all over the thing.
I had that same reaction at first. It is definitely different than
cvs or svn. The first time I tried to use it, I gave up. The second
time I tried to use it, I gave up. The third time I tried to use it,
I almost gave up. But now I love it. A couple of really nice things:
In CVS or SVN, there is no easy way (AFAIK) to get the entire history
of all changes to the repository. You can get the history of changes
to a FILE, but not the history of changes, period. In git, you just
run "git log". (Of course if you want to restrict the output to
changes that modified a certain file, you just do "git log filename".)
If you are trying to find the last time something related to mumble
was changed, you can run "git log -Smumble", and it shows you every
commit that adds or removes a line containing the string "mumble".
This is pretty useful when trying to familiarize yourself with the
history of a certain bit of code. There are also options to search by
regex, etc.
The branching and merging stuff is incredibly good and useful. It
takes a bit of getting used to the commands, but it is so much easier
than cvs or svn. Actually, svn isn't bad for MAKING branches (which
was what initially persuaded me to use it), but it @$# sucks for
merging them. It is just terrible. It may even be worse than CVS.
Don't get me wrong: I used CVS very happily for more than 10 years,
and it does what it does just fine, but git is so much more powerful
that it's not even funny. I can't get over how much faster I can do
things now that used to be a major headache.
...Robert
