Re: Git in a Nutshell guide

On Nov 19, 2007, at 5:14 PM, Jonas Juselius wrote:

You can create a repository on repo.or.cz then :)

As it is often the case different people happen to work on similar things without knowing each other. I started http://repo.or.cz/w/ tutorial.git which is meant to be a big Beamer presentation that presents Git thoroughly. I wrote some ideas but didn't start to write the slides. Just in case you want to have a look.

One of the things you said in your guide is that Git is easy to learn. I think this is wrong. Git is way more complicated than most other SCMs, especially compared to SVN. Its documentation is far behind, compared to what other SCMs have. There is no real user guide and the man pages are incomplete, at best. I know saying this is a bit harsh, especially to the people out there that are working and sending patches to improve the documentation, but I think we have to admit that it's true, even though Git is making progress on this aspect.

What I hope to achieve, when I'll have time to write my slides, is to have some sort of equivalent of the wonderful Autotools tutorial (http://www-src.lip6.fr/homepages/Alexandre.Duret-Lutz/ autotools.html) which is definitely the only thing you need to read when you want to learn the Autotools (which are also quite complicated, let's admit it).

Please don't flame me by saying that Git isn't hard to use and everything. It's the typical reaction of people who know how the things work. Git is pretty simple to use once you know how it works. But compared to SVN (for instance) it's hard to learn. People have to change the way they work to take all the benefits of Git, and to do this, they have to understand why that new way of working differently is better for them.