Subject: Re: git newbie problems

From: Graham Percival <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2006 00:01:01 -0800

Jakub Narebski wrote:
> Graham Percival wrote:
> 
>> flailed around looking for magic commands to make things work.  By "make 
>> things work", I mean imitating my work style with cvs:
> 
> Perhaps it would be better to at least read cvs-migration.txt
>   http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/cvs-migration.html
> and all tutorials.

I skimmed through the cvs-migration, the tutorial (part 1 and 2), and 
the "everyday git".  I didn't notice any "how to deal with merges 
problems"... it was unfortunate that the merge problems arose the very 
first time I tried to upload my changes.  If I had used git for a few 
days before it happened, I would have had more confidence to track down 
the problem (or email for help earlier!).

> There are some commands which CVS didn't have, and which are very useful
> with git: I'm talking here about "git show" (show latest change), "git
> log" (show kind of changelog), and gitk (graphical history viewer) or qgit
> (alternate graphical history viewer in Qt).

Yes, I don't doubt that git has many improvements -- the main developers 
of my project must have had some reason for moving away from cvs!  I'm 
speaking as a new user who wants to get very simple work done.  All I 
wanted to do was to fix a few typos in the lilypond documentation; the 
information about importing cvs projects or changing branches obscured 
the stuff I really wanted.

> Yes, the git error messages certainly needs to be made more user-friendly.
> What git says here that one version has '.gitignore' file handled by version
> control, and second has it outside version control. At least I think what
> it does. "git ls-files --unmerged" or "git diff --merge --summary" should
> show 'true conflicts'.

Thanks for the suggestions!

> By the way, which version of git do you use? I think this particular check
> (if it is the case of this error) was relaxed.

git version 1.4.4.1
I installed it via fink/unstable on OSX.

Cheers,