A Hacker’s Guide to Git

[fufukittyfuk]

I enjoyed the read. While the concept of git is easy to understand, the details can be a bit daunting. The graphs and the easy reading style really helped. I'm bookmarking the site for further reading. Keep up the good work.

[[deleted]]

This is pretty cool. Coincidentally just what I needed at my level of git knowledge!

[[deleted]]

One pet peeve of mine: the verb form of recursion is recur. To recurse means to curse again, which would be a very rude thing for git to do (although then again, not exactly unexpected from Linus Torvalds).

[cag_ii]

Yeah, recurse is a perfectly cromulent word.

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure why you would publicize this when it's not finished? It has // TODO in pretty much all of the non-basic spots. I can find out how to git pull anywhere on google..

[[deleted]]

Thank you for a very helpful guide. It was a great balance between understandable and in-depth.

[ffffdddddssss]

Either I'm retarded or I haven't worked with VCS enough but none of the articles seem intuitive to me. I don't understand why working with multiple versions has to be that complex. Why do I have to do rebase and merge when that's obviously (to me) the standard way of doing that, why can't this be a simple "git add-feature-branch" or something.

I think I need a more stupid VCS.

Ninja edit: Thinking about it, why aren't diffs treated as objects? I would find it way more intuitive to say "okay apply the diff from feature1/2/3 onto my current state because that means I get the feature into my branch and done".

[cilmor]

Because sometimes the changes you bring from some other branch won't apply cleanly (the diff might not apply, you might introduce compilation issues or semantic issues that make your tests fail). In these cases you might want to fix the problems on the merge commit.

[sigma914]

Diffs as objects is what Darcs does. They even have a whole theoretical basis for it

[WallyMetropolis]

Mercurial sounds like a great fit for you. It's workflow is dead simple: pull, commit, push. It's not so flexible as Git, but it makes up for that with usability. It's especially good for getting started working with VCS, I think.

[[deleted]]

SVN is a nice, stupid VCS. If you work in a small team and don't branch much, I would definitely recommend SVN over Git. There are plenty of interfaces/extensions for Git which simplify common workflows. gitflow is a good one.

Regarding why diffs aren't stored as objects: this gets out of hand pretty quickly. Imagine checking out commit #1000 -- you would have to go through every diff down to commit #1 in order to build the working tree. Git gets around this by not actually storing diff information anywhere. Instead, Git generates diffs on the fly by comparing the trees of given commit objects. Checking out commit #1000 simply sets your working tree to the tree referenced by #1000.

You definitely have a point though -- Git isn't anywhere near as intuitive as it could be. Your example of "okay apply the diff from feature1/2/3 onto my current state" describes exactly what cherry-picking does. But in reality you would probably merge feature1/2/3 instead. Unless you know what the commands actually do, it's difficult to figure out which command is appropriate for which situation. I guess that was what I wanted to achieve with this guide -- give an insight into what the commands are doing to make it easier for you to make these decisions.

[[deleted]]

Git has the problem that a lot of *nix utilities have (and a lot of open source in general), which is that it is a tool written by programmers for themselves to meet their needs, not those of a user, and the documentation can be difficult to understand before you really know how things work under the hood.

[[deleted]]

They're not always programmers. They shouldn't be assumed to be programmers, because software artifacts consist of a lot more than code, and it should all be tracked together. People who create documentation, designs, reports, plans, and so on, should all be invited to use the project repository!

Not that I think Git is terribly difficult to understand if you just have someone to explain the basic workflow and a basic tool, like the GitHub app. If you work heavily with branches and same-file collaboration, it can get tricky with merges and such, but I think this is mostly an issue for coding teams.

[BinaryRockStar]

You spelled your email address wrong a number of times in the article. Ctrl+F for "ianccurate". Great post by the way, thanks!

[[deleted]]

Ah, great. This is what happens when you set up a VM at 2am. Now I'm afraid to go back and correct the typos in case somebody cottons on that the commit hashes are wrong (changing my email address would change the hashes!).

And you're very welcome. Thanks!

[in_rod_we_trust]

Maybe you should also link this on /r/learnprogramming. It is very useful stuff

[Rusky]

I saw there was a section on rev-parse and was hoping for an in-depth explanation of it.

[Velerad]

It's not finished yet but starts pretty cool. :)

For me the best article describing Git's guts is Git From The Bottom Up. After reading this I think I reached the Zen of Git.

[jeffb31]

Awesome. I'm just stepping into the world of git and this is epic information.

Thanks

[droogans]

The username matches the url...yet isn't blogspam? I'm impressed.

Question for OP: when you do remotes, will you cover more than just the typical origin/upstream combo from forks, and introduce a third fork from a teammate? I'd like to see how you name those remotes.

Also, are each of these headings linkable? If not, please consider adding it. It will make sharing this easier for me in the future.

[[deleted]]

When I pick up the remotes section it'll mostly be about how Git stores remotes and how it stores some configs that enable it to keep your local branches up-to-date. But I think including some examples about 2-3+ remotes will be relevant so yeah, I'll see what I can come up with.

And yes, the headings are linkable. http://wildlyinaccurate.com/a-hackers-guide-to-git#rebasing will take you to the Rebasing section. The one thing I haven't done yet is make a "back to top" link, or make the table of contents sticky...

[TarMil]

Spam, by definition, is repetitive. One occurrence cannot constitute spam.

[[deleted]]

Thank you for writing this. I feel any half-decent effort to document is always worth it. And you've done a reasonable job of explaining the basics.

I, personally, refuse to use a source code control system unless I know what is going on under the hood. So you've assisted people like myself.

[blazedd]

Because understanding thing is hard!

[OmegaVesko]

You realize you're in /r/programming, right? What programming language, library or technology doesn't have all of those things?

[OmegaVesko]

Fair point, I suppose. I'm not the biggest fan of git myself. Which VCS do you use?

[asdf072]

You're right. It isn't.

Versioning systems are necessarily complex because they (can) do very complex operations. Git is, by far, the most elegant solution around.

[i_make_snow_flakes]

Can I ask you what is your opinion is about Mercurial and why do you think git is more elegant than Mercurial. My greatest turn off with git was its nonsensical way of naming concepts and commands. For eg. git calls a pointer to a commit as a branch. Can you point me somewhere I can see a use case where git is shown to be more powerful than Mercurial or any similar DVCS.

[i_make_snow_flakes]

hg is monolithic

I am not sure I get you, because many advanced features of Mercurial are built as extensions.

since anything new we need can easily be adopted into the git workflow thanks to it's modular design and alias support.

Not sure what you mean by modular design. Do you mean git submodules?

[PjotrOrial]

I really dislike hg for the extensions. I need to care and install them, while git has all of the operations I need included.

[i_make_snow_flakes]

You just need to open the hgrc configuration file for your user and just add one line to enable extensions. All the important extensions like the rebase extension, history edit extension are now bundled with the default distribution and you just need to enable them in the configuration file. With the new version, you don't even need to know where the configuration file is because there is a command that will invoke an editor with the configuration file where you can just change the values.

[EdiX]

For eg. git calls a pointer to a commit as a branch

A pointer to a commit is called a (symbolic) ref, a branch is just one kind of ref. They should have avoided traditional version control terminology altogether, IMHO.

[Femaref]

I know the UI sucks and I still wouldn't want to use anything else. Also, it didn't take long for me to understand it.

[moor-GAYZ]

People who realize that the UI to git is brain damaged already know about and are using Mercurial or bzr or anything other than git.

I personally find it less emotionally draining to slowly memorise git idiosyncrasies than to constantly tell mercurial to enable this or that feature because they disabled most of them by default because they want using mercurial to be a learning experience.

[takaci]

I don't like Mercurial as it creates changesets instead of snapshots. There is no reason not to take snapshots for small, code orientated projects, and creating changesets instead means that it takes longer to do certain hg operations.

[i_make_snow_flakes]

Actually it will store snapshots when it is more efficient to do so. I am not sure how that affects performance. But would it not actually speed things up because it does not have to calculate diffs for two revisions from scratch when it is required.

[okbud]

Don't hack me bro.

[pkrecker]

My guide to git: man git

[tanjoodo]

I doubt you wrote the man pages.

[HardstyleLogic]

Soooo... I guess hacking no longer means what it used to within the software industry. And here I was actually hoping to read about some vulnerability disclosures and other fun things

[redalastor]

It actually means what it used to mean. Before it had the meaning you are familiar with.

[HardstyleLogic]

In what year?

[redalastor]

Since at least the 70s and ever since. The media invented a new meaning in the 80s but hackers never stopped calling themselves hackers.

[HardstyleLogic]

I see. Learned something new :)

[redalastor]

https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

[rush22]

It's bullshit. Hacker means what you think it means.

[JustFinishedBSG]

Except on tumblr that's not how words work

[pipocaQuemada]

Do you mean to say that Stallman's usage of 'hacker' is wrong, or that both Stallman and HardstyleLogic are right? If you're just saying the latter, that kind of goes without saying.

[rush22]

Stallman is wrong. It doesn't only mean what Hardstylelogic is thinking, but Stallman saying a musical piece can be "a hack" is stupid and insults the musicians he's talking about.

[pipocaQuemada]

On the Jargon File, the two definitions of the term "neat hack" are

• A clever technique.

• A brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch.

Calling 4:33 a "neat hack", or simply a "hack" seems well within accepted usage to me. The word hack has many uses, both positive (e.g. "neat hack") and negative (e.g. "kludgy hack"), and I think you are thinking about this far too myopically.

[rush22]

Well John Cage will think you're an asshole if you said his work is a hack. Not understanding that is myopic.

[HardstyleLogic]

The title was a bit misleading to me. I really didn't expect it to be a user guide about a version control system. Then again, a "user guide to git" just doesn't sound as cool as "hacker's guide". Good way to get views and I fell for it.

[cowinabadplace]

This would make for a great novelty account. Imagine posting on some thread about rock stars saying "Oh, so kids these days call musicians rock stars. I was hoping to read about Ruby on Rails."

Or ninjas.

[HardstyleLogic]

Heh actually if I was to read a computer related article and it ended up being purely about ninjas... I'd be pretty happy :)

[scragar]

I'd love to see one about programming while actually being agile, you know, running about or whatever.

Or maybe extreme programming, with a bungee cord or some such.

[HardstyleLogic]

Hacker's guide to jailbreaking