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.
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
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 )
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.

Popular posts from this blog

Why schema definition belongs in the database

Earlier, I wrote about how ORM developers shouldn't try to re-invent SQL . It doesn't need to be done, and you're not likely to end up with an actual improvement. SQL may be designed by committee, but it's also been refined from thousands if not millions of man-years of database experience. The same applies to DDL. (Data Definition Langage -- the part of the SQL standard that deals with CREATE and ALTER.) Unfortunately, a number of Python ORMs are trying to replace DDL with a homegrown Python API. This is a Bad Thing. There are at least four reasons why: Standards compliance Completeness Maintainability Beauty Standards compliance SQL DDL is a standard. That means if you want something more sophisticated than Emacs, you can choose any of half a dozen modeling tools like ERwin or ER/Studio to generate and edit your DDL. The Python data definition APIs, by contrast, aren't even compatibile with other Python tools. You can't take a table definition

Python at Mozy.com

At my day job, I write code for a company called Berkeley Data Systems. (They found me through this blog, actually. It's been a good place to work.) Our first product is free online backup at mozy.com . Our second beta release was yesterday; the obvious problems have been fixed, so I feel reasonably good about blogging about it. Our back end, which is the most algorithmically complex part -- as opposed to fighting-Microsoft-APIs complex, as we have to in our desktop client -- is 90% in python with one C extension for speed. We (well, they, since I wasn't at the company at that point) initially chose Python for speed of development, and it's definitely fulfilled that expectation. (It's also lived up to its reputation for readability, in that the Python code has had 3 different developers -- in serial -- with very quick ramp-ups in each case. Python's succinctness and and one-obvious-way-to-do-it philosophy played a big part in this.) If you try it out, pleas

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