Like Linux, git is taking a while to "mature" from a user's perspective. It's ludicrously powerful -- it's as much as file system as a distributed VCS -- and its 1,001 options need to be distilled for the masses into the handful and a half of essentials.
It's worth contemplating that Linus doesn't hang around defending git. He put it out there -- bless him -- and let it take on its own life. And its destiny is up to us.
git doesn't need to be taken out of the command line. That's where its true power lies, as with all *nix tools. The fact that github can do so much with it is because of this feature, not because they are changing it. That's a powerful thing, and a testament to Linus' design of git.
I bet Linus never envisioned github when building git. And that something so revolutionary -- and I do think github is revolutionary, albeit for a niche of geeks -- should come out of such a development is testament of git's design.
Sure it's a hard package to master -- I haven't -- but whatever you want, and a lot more, is there if you need it. And no-one yet, to my knowledge, has complained that git killed their project.
Well said. When I talk to people at conferences and whatnot about GitHub, they're often surprised we run a core git stack with few modifications. Repositories are stored as plain old git repositories and we use git's normal command line interface for many types of operations.
It really is a testament to git's design (and I think maybe classically designed UNIX programs in general) that we've been able to do so much on the server with something designed mostly for local command line interaction.
People still talk about git's "lack of extensibility" (i.e., no library / you can't write extension programs in Python) but I've found that the "write programs that do one thing" model lends itself extremely well to all kinds of unplanned and novel uses.
Comments
Like Linux, git is taking a while to "mature" from a user's perspective. It's ludicrously powerful -- it's as much as file system as a distributed VCS -- and its 1,001 options need to be distilled for the masses into the handful and a half of essentials.
It's worth contemplating that Linus doesn't hang around defending git. He put it out there -- bless him -- and let it take on its own life. And its destiny is up to us.
git doesn't need to be taken out of the command line. That's where its true power lies, as with all *nix tools. The fact that github can do so much with it is because of this feature, not because they are changing it. That's a powerful thing, and a testament to Linus' design of git.
I bet Linus never envisioned github when building git. And that something so revolutionary -- and I do think github is revolutionary, albeit for a niche of geeks -- should come out of such a development is testament of git's design.
Sure it's a hard package to master -- I haven't -- but whatever you want, and a lot more, is there if you need it. And no-one yet, to my knowledge, has complained that git killed their project.
Well said. When I talk to people at conferences and whatnot about GitHub, they're often surprised we run a core git stack with few modifications. Repositories are stored as plain old git repositories and we use git's normal command line interface for many types of operations.
It really is a testament to git's design (and I think maybe classically designed UNIX programs in general) that we've been able to do so much on the server with something designed mostly for local command line interaction.
People still talk about git's "lack of extensibility" (i.e., no library / you can't write extension programs in Python) but I've found that the "write programs that do one thing" model lends itself extremely well to all kinds of unplanned and novel uses.