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Response: Papa and Git
September 06th, 2017
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Papa phlogged [0] about breaking down and finally learning git. I have
read a few things recently on the bboard at SDF and on Mastodon about
people's preference for older VCS's like RCS over git. There's a general
sentiment that it's 'too much' or 'too complex' for the needs of the
individual. I wholeheartedly disagree with both points.

Too difficult/complex:

While git is definitely different than the VCS's that came before it,
I can't call it difficult at all for a community that regularly operates
retro operating systems and deals with archaic source packages on a daily
basis. I recommend reading the first six or seven chapters of The Git Book
[1], freely available online. It can be read in an hour or two and will
give all the background necessary to use git reasonably well.

Too much for individual needs:

Git gives the full power of version control in a local environment. You
can use literally everything in the toolbox when you're offline in your
basement or on a cruise or wherever. You don't need to connect to the
internet to commit that last change, or cherry-pick a fix from another
branch you were playing around with for fun. That's amazing! It's also
absolutely fantastic to have an an individual.

I drop nearly everything I do in the shell into a git repo. This gopher
hole? Yep, it's in git. Why? Why not!? Every phost is versioned, as are my
experiments. If I want to do something bananas, I create a new branch and
give it a go. Didn't work out? I'll swap back to master and carry on. That
experimental shenanigans is in version control now and one day I may go
play around with it again.

In some cases I back up these git repos to a remote, like bitbucket, that
allows for free private repos, but not always. Sometimes I'm just playing
around with an email, or taking notes on something I'm reading. I create
a folder, init git, and type away. Git is like a silent partner there to
help me out in whatever I might need. 90% of the time, that means I run:

$ git init
$ git add <filename>
$ git commit -m '<commit message>

And that's about it. Once in a blue moon I'll bust out some logs or check
out an old commit to grab at something old. For instance, earlier today
I was trying to remember some settings I had been using with Lastpass-CLI
when I was using mutt. I had that in my dotfiles repo about 6 months ago,
so I just jumped to a commit from around that time and grabbed the code
I needed.

This response got away from me.

TL;DR: Git is awesome. Not difficult at all. Great for personal use.

[0] gopher://grex.org/0/~papa/pgphlog/afu-Inevitable_git
[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

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