Re: GIT vs Other: Need argument

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 18, 2007, 20:19 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0704181312060.2828@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <8b65902a0704181308i41c878ebi88c03a929769ba39@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007, Guilhem Bonnefille wrote:

> 
> Yes, but I think that, as Git has ton more capabilities, user has to
> understand more things than with CVS.

I do agree.

The whole "branch" thing is something you can ignore in CVS, but it's simply very hard to ignore in git, because even *if* you just follow another repository, git kind of forces you to be aware of the difference between "local branch" and "remote tracking branch".

I think that's fairly fundamental to being distributed, though.

> I don't know lot of corporate teams, but here, our developers are
> REALLY not motivated by VCS. It's only a way to share work. And I'm
> not talking about concurrent modification: lot of people in my office
> really think that the better model is the locked one.

Sure. At one level they may even be right. It's just that the locked model obviously doesn't work past a certain scenario. But explaining that to somebody who doesn't even think outside his own scenario is pointless.

So no question: git has a level of abstraction and perhaps requires a higher-level view than RCS and CVS do. And I can well imagine that it is seen as more "difficult" because of that.

I just haev to say that I worked with CVS at a commercial company for seven years, and I *did* do things like branches and merges etc, and despite workign with it at that level (not that I was the expert by any means: we had a person who came in with the main job literally being the tools around CVS to make branching more convenient etc), I seriously feel that CVS was a *lot* harder to get into than it is to get into git.

> So for such people, I really think raw Git is much more complicated
> than CVS/SVN.

I do wonder what we could do about that. I think you can use git in the "SVN tracker only" model, and I really thought it was pretty damn simple, but ...

		Linus