It’s because git is a complex tool to solve complex problems. If you’re one hacker working alone, RCS will do an acceptable job. As soon as you add a second hacker, things change and RCS will quickly show its limitations. FOSS version control went through CVS and SVN before finally arriving at git, and there are good reasons we made each of those transitions. For that matter, CVS and SVN had plenty of arcane stuff to fix weird scenarios, too, and in my subjective experience, git doesn’t pile on appreciably more.
You think deleting an empty directory should be easy? CVS laughs at your effort, puny developer.
It’s because git is a complex tool to solve complex problems. If you’re one hacker working alone, RCS will do an acceptable job. As soon as you add a second hacker, things change and RCS will quickly show its limitations. FOSS version control went through CVS and SVN before finally arriving at git, and there are good reasons we made each of those transitions. For that matter, CVS and SVN had plenty of arcane stuff to fix weird scenarios, too, and in my subjective experience, git doesn’t pile on appreciably more.
Yes it is a complex tool that can solve complex problems, but me as a typical developer, I am not doing anything complex with it, and the CLI surface area that’s exposed to me is by and large nonsense and does not meet me where I’m at or with the commands or naming I would expect.
I mean NPM is also a complex tool, but the CLI surface area of NPM is “npm install”.
I am not doing anything complex with it
So basic, well documented, easily understandable commands like git add, git commit, git push, git branch, and git checkout should have you covered.
the CLI surface area that’s exposed to me is by and large nonsense and does not meet me where I’m at
What an interesting way to say “git has steep learning curve”. Which is true, git takes time to learn and even more to master. You can get there solely by reading the man pages and online docs though, which isn’t something a lot of other complex tools can say (looking at you kubernetes).
Also I don’t know if a package manager really compares in complexity to git, which is not just a version control tool, it’s also a thin interface for manipulating a directed acyclic graph.
So basic, well documented, easily understandable commands like git add, git commit, git push, git branch, and git checkout should have you covered.
You mean: git add -A, git commit -m "xxx", git push or git push -u origin --set-upstream, etc. etc. etc. I get that there’s probably a reason for it’s complexity, but it doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t just have a steep learning curve, it’s flat out remarkably user unfriendly sometimes.
