Understanding Git

After working with Git for over a decade, we decide to take a deep dive into how it works, while Michael, Allen, and Joe apparently still don’t understand Git.

The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode190.

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Survey Says

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Git Under the Covers

This is the book Outlaw was trying to remember … we think!

How to approach Git; general strategy

• This episode was inspired by an article written by Mark Dominus.
• Git commits are immutable snapshots of the repository.
• Branches are named sequences of commits.
• Every object gets a unique id based on its content.
• The author is not a fan of how the command set has evolved over time.
• With Git, you need to think about what state your repository is in, and what state you would like to be in.
  • There are likely a number of ways to achieve that desired state.
• If you try to understand the commands without understanding the model, you can get lost. For example:
  • git reset does three different things depending on the flags used,
  • git checkout even worse (per the author), and
  • The opposite of git-push is not git-pull, it’s git-fetch.
• Possibly the worst part of the above is if you don’t understand the model and what’s happening to the model, you won’t know the right questions to ask to get back into a good state.
• Mark said the thing that saved him from frustration with Git is the book Git from the Bottom Up by John Wiegley (jwiegley.github.io)