Skip to main content

Frustrated with git

I'm a little over a week into a git immersion program.  Let me just say that git's reputation of being a little arcane (okay, more than a little) and having a steep learning curve is 100% deserved.

One thing that would mitigate things is if git would give you feedback when you tell it to do nonsense.  But it doesn't.  Here's me trying to get machine B to always merge the debug branch from machine A when I pull:


232 git config branch.debug.remote origin
234 git config branch.master.remote origin
236 git config branch.master.remote origin/debug

All of these commands completed silently. None accomplished what I wanted. In the end I renamed master to old and debug to master to avoid having to fight it. Then I blew away my working copy and re-cloned because those config statements had created a new problem that I didn't know how to undo.

I'm sure the git virtuosos out there will know what was wrong.  That's not the point.  The point is that the tool gave me no feedback.  It was like git was telling me, "Figure it out yourself.  Or don't.  I don't care."  Which is par for the course with my git experience so far.

Comments

Anonymous said…
You touched on my only real gripe with git. I do things fairly frequently that I can't figure out how to undo. Usually a git reset --hard works fine, but sometimes it doesn't.
11:35 PM
Christos Trochalakis said…
My version of git (1.6.0.4) explains the situation:

$ git pull
You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you
want to merge with, and 'branch.foo.merge' in
your configuration file does not tell me either. Please
name which branch you want to merge on the command line and
try again (e.g. 'git pull <repository> <refspec>').
See git-pull(1) for details on the refspec.

If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to
configure the following variables in your configuration
file:

branch.foo.remote = <nickname>
branch.foo.merge = <remote-ref>
remote.<nickname>.url = <url>
remote.<nickname>.fetch = <refspec>

See git-config(1) for details.

======

So you have to do something like this:
git config branch.foo.remote = origin
git config branch.foo.merge = refs/heads/master

Now, everytime you pull from the local foo branch it will merge with origin/master
2:40 AM
mike bayer said…
Linus should write the error messages personally, so we'd have things like "You didn't specify anything to merge. You really aren't thinking, are you?"

(for reference: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/542867 )
8:10 AM
Anonymous said…
Yeah. This is definitely git's weakness. My least favorite one is "You have unresolved conflicts." (or something close to that) when fixing a pull conflict by trying to accept the remote changes over local ones, the way one would with Subversion.

The mailing list answer was something along the lines of 'this is an edge case that rarely happens' rather than 'ok, this reply can be improved'. That sucks.
3:29 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PyCon Python IDE review

I presented an IDE review at PyCon last Friday. It was basically a re-review of what I thought were the 3 most promising IDEs from the Utah Python User Group IDE review , to which I added SPE, which was by far the most popular of the ones we left out that time. The versions reviewed are: PyDev 1.0.2 SPE 0.8.2.a Komodo 3.5.2 Wing IDE 2.1 beta 1 I'd intended to base my presentation around a comparison of writing a smallish program in each of the IDEs, but the more I tried to make this not suck, the more I realized it was a losing proposition. Instead, I decided to try to focus on the features in each that most set them apart from the others (both positive and negative); this seemed more likely be useful. (I did a new feature matrix for this review, which is included after my comments. The slides I used are also up, at http://utahpython.org/jellis/pycon-ides.pdf , but aren't very useful absent video of the presentation itself. Hence this post.) PyDev PyDev has g...
43 comments
Read more

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...
30 comments
Read more

A review of 6 Python IDEs

(March 2006: you may also be interested the updated review I did for PyCon -- http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/02/pycon-python-ide-review.html .) For September's meeting, the Utah Python User Group hosted an IDE shootout. 5 presenters reviewed 6 IDEs: PyDev 0.9.8.1 Eric3 3.7.1 Boa Constructor 0.4.4 BlackAdder 1.1 Komodo 3.1 Wing IDE 2.0.3 (The windows version was tested for all but Eric3, which was tested on Linux. Eric3 is based on Qt, which basically means you can't run it on Windows unless you've shelled out $$$ for a commerical Qt license, since there is no GPL version of Qt for Windows. Yes, there's Qt Free , but that's not exactly production-ready software.) Perhaps the most notable IDEs not included are SPE and DrPython. Alas, nobody had time to review these, but if you're looking for a free IDE perhaps you should include these in your search, because PyDev was the only one of the 3 free ones that we'd consider using. And if you aren...
36 comments
Read more