Not just the authors. The editors, the designers, the people who do layout, and people who just never wrote a single line of code or typed a single command into a Unix shell in their life... all of them use git, and last I heard, they all have to learn how to use the CLI version of git.
It's nuts. Git is hard enough to learn for people who know the internals of how computers work. Making people who would rather be drawing artwork learn how to use git seems really crazy to me. Hearing the coping stories from non-technical people using git is very sad.
I agree that git is an awfully complex tool for non-technical users to understand. However, the concept of version control is incredibly powerful—anyone who utilizes it has a huge advantage in productivity. Perhaps O'Reilly would be better off providing a more simplified system (perhaps even a simple GUI on top of git, offering a small subset of functionality), but I can see why they insist on a VCS-based workflow.
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Not just the authors. The editors, the designers, the people who do layout, and people who just never wrote a single line of code or typed a single command into a Unix shell in their life... all of them use git, and last I heard, they all have to learn how to use the CLI version of git.
It's nuts. Git is hard enough to learn for people who know the internals of how computers work. Making people who would rather be drawing artwork learn how to use git seems really crazy to me. Hearing the coping stories from non-technical people using git is very sad.
Git with a Gui (Sourcetree, Github etc.) is a pretty straight forward exercise.
I've seen designers use version control with things like: filename.FINALE.jpg filename.Last Finale.jpg filename.Approved Finale.jpg etc.
Certainly its worth the half hour getting your head around the basics of SourceTree than that...
I don't know anything about the situation myself, but jordigh (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9694685) said:
(emphasis mine).
I agree that git is an awfully complex tool for non-technical users to understand. However, the concept of version control is incredibly powerful—anyone who utilizes it has a huge advantage in productivity. Perhaps O'Reilly would be better off providing a more simplified system (perhaps even a simple GUI on top of git, offering a small subset of functionality), but I can see why they insist on a VCS-based workflow.