nick evans – devblog

“What is more Gitish than a dozen geeks passing around a laptop with an awesome patch so everyone can sign off on it, then four core Git developers trying to figure out how to use git send-email for 10 minutes?” – from GitTogether 2008

You do realize that this completely plays into certain negative stereotypes of git, don’t you?  Passing a laptop around so that people can sign a patch/commit?  This seems to me like something a DVCS ought to make easy (easier than passing a laptop around).  Git core developers take more than a minute to figure out how to work with git send-email?  The fact that these things seem very “gitish” is evidence for some of git’s more negative stereotypes (some deserved, some not).

The article also mentions some much needed UI improvement to the index/cache workflow, and that sounds great.  I hope git continues to take a good critical look at some of its current UI decisions.

For the record, I prefer bzr, but I don’t hate git.  It’s a great and powerful piece of software, and has served the linux kernel and other Free/Libre/Open-Source projects tremendously.  It’s considerably better than svn or cvs for most open source projects, and it has some strengths that make it better than the other DVCS tools for certain projects.  But I do think it is over-hyped.  And I wouldn’t willingly inflict it upon myself for any personal project.  I personally think that most projects would be better served by one of the other open source DVCS tools: especially bzr (my VCS of choice), or hg.