Every other day, Git is the best version control ever. Today, got damn it Git, why can't it just work

Git good

I am of the firm belief that one day we will look back as an industry and wonder what in the blue hell we were all smoking to ever think Git was a good idea. Not just because something better will come along - because that's inevitable in this field no matter how good something is - but just because it will become common knowledge to everyone, finally, that what I've been saying for years is true, namely that Git sucks ass and only became the de facto standard because everyone is on Linus' tip.

@fzammetti The massive success of Github shows that Git is super cool tech that can solve hairy problems that 99% of the projects will never even have - and also that Git is a completely unusable piece of shit.

That's typical for OSS - success in backend, but a total disaster for interactive use. I think the bazar development model is responsible both for the success and the failure. When everyone hacks in some shit, you get highly configurable software, but with no coherent vision. Doesn't matter much if it's in the backend where you script it once and never touch it again.

@Fast-Nop @fzammetti Let's say that it's true (not sure if I agree) and git is garbage, then what's the alternative?

You surely want some sort of version control, right?

@Geoxion For 99% of the projects, SVN has always been good enough. It's huge projects like the Linux kernel with thousands of devs world-wide that cannot use SVN because a centralised server approach wouldn't scale. In my company, we use SVN happily, and one of the good features is that is is centralised.

For the rest, they don't really need Git, and the killer feature of Github is providing Git tech without its insane UI.

@Geoxion I agree completely with what @Fast-Nop said above: SVN is more than sufficient the vast majority of the time while also being far simpler. Git is like one of those ridiculously massive Swiss army knives that has like 50 different things in it: in the very limited cases where you actually need all 50 of those things it's fantastic and no other tool will do. In those cases, use it. But, most of the time, you just need a basic knife, and maybe a sawblade. And, what's worse, when you have all 50 of those things (read: Git), you start to do stupid things just because you think you have to. You start altering your workflow BASED ON THE TOOL YOU'RE USING, not because it inherently fits what you're trying to accomplish. The result is we have way overcomplicated workflows that barely anyone understands. I mean, when "just copy off your changes, re-clone, copy your changes back in, and commit" is the de facto answer for many Git issues, that alone tells you it has big problems.