Re: GIT vs Other: Need argument

From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Apr 18, 2007, 20:57 UTC
Message-ID: <20070418205706.GH24963@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <vpqejmhy3x2.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 07:43:05PM +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> As a beginner, I went to http://git.or.cz/, clicked "crash courses",
> and since I didn't find "git from scratch", I clicked "git for CVS
> users" (I know CVS, but haven't used it for a long time, I'm mostly a
> bzr user converted from GNU Arch).
> 
> There, the commands are not "git something", but "cg something". Well,
> not always, at least. Indeed, there's still a "git blame", a reference
> to "git-rev-parse manpage".
> 
> Then, I can't even find it in the tutorial, but somewhere, it should
> be mentionned to say who I am in ~/.gitconfig.

Yeah, one of the biggest source of confusion is that a lot of the resources available on http://git.or.cz refers very heavily to cg, but most of the discussion on the git mailing list doesn't involve using cg, and as some have argued, it's not clear cg is very useful; at this point, given the advances in git's usability in the 1.5 series.

So what I normally tell new users is to *not* look at http://git.or.cz, since more than once people have taken off points on git's usability because of the fact that some of the tutorials (in particular the "git for CVS users") are really talkinga about cogito, not git, and this gets highly confusing for many new users.

Instead, I tell people they should look at this:

	http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

... and reference the tutorials off of this site. It seems to me that the documentation and tutorials on this site tends to get update much more frequently and religiously than the resources on http://git.or.cz --- although there is still some good stuff there that isn't elsewhere. But unfortunately, for a new user, the fact that they have to filter out information that might be out of date, or cogito-specific, from what is relevant, makes it such that I can't really recommend that site to new users.

> So, cogito has probably been of a real use at the beginning, where git
> was said to be almost unuseable without anything else (I didn't try
> git at that time), but I don't think it's the case anymore.

Yep; and unfortunately, at this point, using cg probably is more confusing compared to just simply using raw git all by itself.

						- Ted