<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Ivan Kozik <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ivan@ludios.org">ivan@ludios.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im">On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 22:19, Kevin Horn <<a href="mailto:kevin.horn@gmail.com">kevin.horn@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> Git requires bash. This makes it painful for me (on Windows).<br>
<br>
</div>In what sense? You can run git from cmd.exe, without having to deal<br>
with bash. (You're not required to use 'Git Bash'.)<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div><br>Interesting. I was told (and had read) that it _was_ required. So I've been <br>operating under that assumption. If you can run it in a cmd.exe window that<br>_might_ relieve one of my pain points.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">
> Also, Git _is_ worse on Windows than it is on *nix. It's just not as bad as<br>
> it _used_ to be. It's functional. It works. But it is difficult to deal<br>
> with,<br>
> and a lot of Windows users I have talked to (as well as myself, of course)<br>
> just don't like using it.<br>
<br>
</div>Is there anything in specific that is difficult? I haven't had<br>
Windows-specific problems with Git on Windows, and I've been using it<br>
a lot.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Ivan<br>
</font><div><div></div><br></div></blockquote></div><br>Nothing terribly specific comes to mind, as I don't _use_ git very often.<br><br>Only one of the projects I have ever contributed to uses git, and they <br>just switched recently (from Mercurial, which makes very little sense to me<br>
as they are just about feature-equivalent). The others all use Mercurial, with <br>the exception of Twisted. So when I started learning about DVCS, Mercurial <br>was pretty much my introduction (aside: it seems to me that people in general <br>
seem to prefer whatever DVCS they were originally introduced to).<br><br>Every couple of months I pull down a "new" release of git or TortoiseGit or whatever <br>and tinker around with it, but it just isn't very nice compared to Mercurial. Maybe <br>
it will be someday.<br><br>And it's not that anything is particularly _difficult_, so much as annoying.<br>I find the CLI interface weird and clunky. I recall thinking some of the design <br>decisions were not particularly good (though it's been long enough that I can't <br>
recall what they were exactly...and I have some complaints about the design of<br>pretty much every DVCS out there, so...). These aren't Windows-specific issues<br>of course, but when you add the Windows-specific issues on top of them, it just <br>
makes git that much worse to deal with. <br><br>Of course, this is entirely subjective, and is totally my own opinion. Maybe the<br>next time I update git it will annoy me less.<br><br>As far as specific Windows-related issues, here's what I can come up with. These<br>
are all pretty vague, I'm afraid...<br><br>- Let's start with installing. It would be really nice to be able to go to a website, download <br>a package or archive or something, read some instructions and install git. Preferably with <br>
Tortoise-X-like Explorer shell integration (though I can live without that). I have never been <br>able to do that. Instead, it's try the above, have it not work, search Google for a bunch of <br>tutorial-style blog posts, try a bunch of stuff, maybe edit or move some files in whichever <br>
of several distributions I've had to download, and spend at least a couple of hours getting <br>things working. At this point I'm already annoyed with git and I haven't even started using it yet.<br><br>- Now I'm going to check things out. OK, fine. First hurdle is that terminology is different from<br>
what I'm used to, though that's hardly Git's fault, and I can deal with that. But in order to deal <br>with the change in terminology, coming from Mercurial, I'd really like to see some nice online help.<br>
Last I checked, git totally failed in this area, and was noticeably worse on Windows than on *nix.<br>(This was maybe 3 or 4 months ago). Ok, so now I'm having to search web/man pages for how to <br>use git properly. Admittedly, some of this is necessary anyway for something as complex as <br>
a DVCS system, but it shouldn't be necessary for basic commands. I also seem to recall being <br>annoyed by syntax for various commands actually being slightly _different_ on Windows than <br>on *nix, but I can't say definitely that that was the case now (it was a long time ago, my <br>
memory is hazy, and I may have just misunderstood something). I have no idea if this is <br>still a problem (assuming it ever really was).<br><br>- I definitely miss Mercurial's friendly little warnings about when I might be about to screw <br>
things up. I doubt git will ever have anything like this. It seems antithetical to the git mindset.<br><br>- Git just seems like it's second class citizen in the git world (this is true of a _huge_ number <br>of open source projects, so it isn't just git, but I have a whole other rant about why this is a <br>
Bad Thing [tm] ). A lot of complaints about git on Win32 (which I find to be pretty valid <br>complaints) I see answered with a sneer and something like: "Oh sure, but that's what you <br>get for using _Windows_."<br>
<br>To sum up, I use both Windows and Linux. That is unlikely to change any time soon. I want my <br>tools to work nicely and be polished in both environments. Git has not impressed me as being <br>able to do this yet. Even if it ever does get to this point, I still probably won't like it as much as<br>
Mercurial, just because hg is what I've become used to, and git doesn't offer much that hg <br>doesn't already have.<br><br>Well, this is already way longer than I had intended it to be...<br><br>Kevin Horn<br>