Re: [boost] [git] neglected aspects

Subject: Re: [boost] [git] neglected aspects
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-02-09 00:35:00

On 2/8/2012 6:42 PM, David A. Greene wrote:
>
> Thomas Heller<thom.heller_at_[hidden]>  writes:
>
>> On 02/08/2012 07:30 AM, Steven Samuel Cole wrote:
>
>
>> I think i miss something fundamental here.
>
> Yes, you are.  You're missing that every operation Steven is talking
> about is directly supported in git.  You use the source control tool to
> manage source changes, always.  There's no need to ever do a manual
> diff/patch.  git manages multiple changes for you and organizes them in
> a logical way.  It is easy to change among them, apply some, test them,
> revert some of them and so on.

Tell me how git magically manages to merge changes by multiple 
developers to the same file when a local repository is pushed to another 
one somewhere else. I alway hear this but refuse to believe it, 
especially as changes made to the second repository are often occuring 
before the developer pushing his changes is even aware of them.

I can not for the life of me see how this is different from multiple 
developers merging their changes to a central repository in SVN. But Git 
users always claim how much better this is, or must be, and I feel like 
the little boy declaring that the emperor has no clothes.

Git users really have to stop claiming that Git is somehow better 
because a distributed VCS system is magically better than a centralized 
one when it comes to merging changes to the same source. Having good 
merge tools has nothing to do with whether one uses a centralized or 
distributed VCS, but rather whether a merge tool can allow the end-user 
to decide if changes made to an already changed source can be done well 
enough so as not break code and be logically coherent. Git may have 
better tools for this than SVN but I can see no reason why this has to 
do with a distributed VCS and a centralized VCS.

I have manually merged changes for years and I do not believe any merge 
tool can be so foolproof to automatically merge changes and guarantee 
that code will not be broken once someone else has made changes to 
source between the time when I first picked up the latest copy and the 
time when I seek to update my copy with my changes.