Comment by ants_everywhere
2 days ago
Yeah we're at the CVS stage where everyone uses it because everyone uses it.
But most people don't need most of its features and many people need features it doesn't have.
If you look up git worktrees, you'll find a lot of blog articles referring to worktrees as a "secret weapon" or similar. So git's secret weapon is a mode that lets you work around the ugliness of branches. This suggests that many people would be better suited by an SCM that isn't branch-based.
It's nice having the full history offline. But the scaling problems force people to adopt a workflow where they have a large number of small git repos instead of keeping the history of related things together. I think there are better designs out there for the typical open source project.
Git now has artificial feet to aim the foot guns at so they hit the right target.
I don't understand what you mean by "the ugliness of branches".
In my experience, branches are totally awesome. Worktrees make branches even more awesome because they let me check out multiple branches at once to separate directories.
The only way it could get better is if it somehow gains the ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once.
> ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once.
So you want shared object storage, but separate branch metadata. That's git clone with hardlinks, which is what Git does locally by default.
Git worktrees won't allow me to check out a branch twice though. I wonder if there's some technical limitation that prevents it.
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