Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

Jumping into this a day late, but:

Carl Worth wrote:

Agreed totally on the second point. It would be great if git natively supported everything people use in Cogito.

I find myself using native git commands for the most part, except for one Cogito command: "cg-update". It is vastly more convenient than git-pull in large part because it automatically merges upstream changes with uncommitted working-copy changes. I suppose you could classify this as "hide the index" in some sense.

Maybe I should give an example of what I mean. Suppose I have two child repositories (owned by different developers, say):

cg-clone repo child1 cg-clone repo child2

Now I go into both of them and make different (hopefull non-conflicting) edits to the same file.

echo foo >> child1/testfile perl -pi -e 's/tree/shrub/' child2/testfile

I push the change from child1 into the integration repo.

cd child1 git-commit -a git-push

Now I want to incorporate the change into child2, where I'm still doing work. With Cogito, I go to child2 and run:

cg-update

and afterwards, the upstream changes are merged into testfile and "git diff" still shows my local edits. With Git native commands, updating child2 if I'm not ready to commit yet is more like:

git-diff --binary > /tmp/patch git-reset --hard git-pull git-apply /tmp/patch

I might have gotten that slightly wrong, but I think I have the general idea right; in any event, it's not nearly as convenient! The alternative is to commit then pull, but then when I want to look at my local edits, I have to remember to diff my working copy against the correct revision, which gets increasingly annoying if I update more than once.

Like others on this list, I'm also trying to sell an existing user base (in this case, they're using Subversion) on Git. The lack of a built-in equivalent to "svn update" is actually a pretty big UI annoyance for people whose workflow doesn't require git's more sophisticated feature set at a given point in time. Even a sophisticated user doesn't need the full power of the tool 100% of the time, so this isn't just a novice vs. expert thing in my opinion.

Absent Cogito, would the lack of a simple "svn update" equivalent be a deal-killing "throw your hands up in disgust and give up" thing? Maybe not, but it's a daily "ugh, why am I having to type extra commands to do something that only took one command in svn?" thing. So it's nice to have Cogito to paper over that particular wart.

If there is a native git equivalent to cg-update including the working-copy automatic merges, I'll be delighted to stand corrected!