GIT isn't perfect. (And other blasphemies.)

Sun, 09 Dec 2018 11:35:00 +0000

I was embarrassingly late in the game coming to GIT as a version control system. Time has since passed and I’m now happily using it. The days when we had to lock files before we worked on them are thankfully a distant memory. My road was a little bumpy…

Orphan git.

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s new version control system and I’m ready to download a project from a GIT server. The first step was to perform a clone of a project. “Clone? That’s a strange word for it. Maybe this is just it’s own way of saying Download.” Whatever you call it, my “clone” was ready and I can get to work. Later, I’ve done my work, tested it my dev-environment and I’m ready to check it in. Before I do that I need to check on any changes the others have done. Looking for a “Get Latest” option, I find “Pull”, which seems to do the right thing. Those changes don’t conflict with mine so I can continue. How do I get my changes back to the server? There’s a “push” option which sounds like it would be the opposite to pull, but that doesn’t do anything. Finally, I find “Commit” and it shows me all my changes with space to write my comments. Success! I’ve committed my changes to the master branch! Sounds final. The red icons next to the modified files have now turned green. There’s no indication there’s more to do, or at least none that’s obvious to this beginner. My job is done so I can now switch my workstation off and disappear on vacation for a week. Not quite. The thing called the “master” branch isn’t the master branch. When I had the “clone” operation and thought the name was a bit odd, it turned out I had just made a complete copy of the code repository and it was now separate from the original. To finish the job, I needed to also perform a push, but after having done the commit. And this is what annoys me about GIT - we profoundly disagree about what’s important. As far as I’m concerned, my local hard disk is just a necessary staging point to the way to the central repository where release builds happen. You perform a commit and that has all the ceremony and pizzazz, but a push deals with the big picture. Ask most GIT clients what’s important an it will answer that its own local repository is the focus of operations. The remote server is basically an after-thought. “Huzzah! We’ve done a commit! Oh, you want to push too. Okay then. Don’t forget to do the push again next time because I won’t remind you if you forget!” (I have, many times, ran completely pointless builds having committed but forgotten to push. The build server builds without my changes and I end up wondering why nothing I did made any difference.)

VersionControl on billpg industries™

GIT isn't perfect. (And other blasphemies.)

Orphan git.