VCS comparison table

[Jeff King]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 01:12:52PM -0700, David Rientjes wrote:

> And I would prefer the opposite because we're talking about git.  As an 
> information manager, it should be seen and not heard.  Nobody is going to 
> spend their time to become a git or CVS or perforce expert.  As an 
> individual primarily interested in development, I should not be required 
> to learn command lines for dozens of different git-specific commands to do 
> my job quickly and effectively.  I would opt for a much more simpler 
> approach and deal with shell scripting for many of these commands because 
> I'm familiar with them and I can pipe any command with the options I 
> already know and have used before to any other command.

I don't understand how converting shell scripts to C has any impact
whatsoever on the usage of git. The plumbing shell scripts didn't go
away; you can still call them and they behave identically.

Is there some specific change in functionality that you're lamenting?

> As a developer on Linux based systems, I should not need to deal with 
> code in a revision control system that is longer and less traceable 
> because the authors of that system decided they wanted to support Windows 
> too.  Moving away from the functionality that the shell provides is a 
> mistake for a system such as git where it could be so advantageous because 
> of the inherent nature of git as an information manager.

Some C->shell conversions may have made the code "longer and less
traceable." However, many of those conversions caused the code to be
shorter (because communication between C functions is simpler than going
over pipes, and because anything involving a data structure more complex
than a string is difficult in the shell) and more robust (fewer
opportunities for quoting/parsing errors, and none of the shell gotchas
like missing the error code in "foo | bar").

Do you have any specific reason to believe that the git code is of worse
quality now than it was before?

> This is the reason why I was a fan of git long ago and used it for my own 
> needs before tons of unnecessary features and unneeded complexity was 
> added on.

Is there something you used to do with git that you no longer can? Is
there a reason you can't ignore the newer commands?

-Peff