git branch help?

[Matt McCutchen]

On Tue, 2010-08-03 at 06:41 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Git is just a PITA in its own league, but DVCSes as a whole are a 
> [...] unhelpful (inherently hard to use) concept.

I can't reproduce either issue.  :D

> broken (*)
> (*) e.g. because of the strong reliance on hashes, which can make the whole 
> thing break down in the event of a hash collision,

"Broken" in the past tense is inaccurate: no SHA-1 collision has been
published yet.  I would like to see DVCSes switch to a stronger hash
algorithm sooner rather than later, but it's not enough of a concern
that I would avoid using them.  If it makes you feel any better, git
will not allow a fetched object to replace a local one with the same
hash, so you can only lose if you fetch from the attacker first.

> and which make commit IDs 
> nonsequential and unpredictable

For sequential commit numbering, try "git describe".

> > Some of the complexity is intrinsic to distributed VCS and has to be
> > weighed against the significant benefits to people who build custom
> > packages, like me.
> 
> I don't see how dist-git makes it any easier to build customized packages. 
> If you really want a local git mirror of a centralized repository, you can 
> also use git-cvs, git-svn or the like.

This is a valid point which I forgot about.

> All this dist-git migration has brought us is chaos, a much higher barrier 
> to entry and much harder work for existing packagers. (And yes, I've also 
> tried to make these points BEFORE the migration, but nobody listened.)

I suppose you are referring to this:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-June/137582.html

The problems with CVS were amply explained there, but it's less clear to
me whether there were compelling reasons to choose git over (e.g.) SVN +
git-svn or the people involved just happened to like distributed version
control, as I do.

-- 
Matt