<story><title>Simple Revision Control</title><url>http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kazinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I am not entirely sure I understand why one wouldn&amp;#x27;t use git for this role.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because, for one thing, &amp;quot;one&amp;quot; sometimes doesn&amp;#x27;t have the computer science degree and years of experience to even begin to understand Git.&lt;p&gt;For many users, using Git means cutting and pasting command line recipes scoured from desperate web searches, and crossing their fingers.&lt;p&gt;This does not go away when you use Git just for personal use with a repo that has no upstream.&lt;p&gt;ESR probably wants something that is simple to use for simple use cases.</text></item><item><author>SwellJoe</author><text>I am not entirely sure I understand why one wouldn&amp;#x27;t use git for this role. If you don&amp;#x27;t need a remote git repository, you don&amp;#x27;t need to use one, and git will be available everywhere. Certainly many production machines will tend to have it for deployment of applications across multiple machines.&lt;p&gt;What are some use cases that don&amp;#x27;t work with git (which is probably already available on the system)? And why wouldn&amp;#x27;t git be an effective tool for that particular role?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m certainly not as experienced as ESR (though, I&amp;#x27;m coming up on 20 years of administering Linux and UNIX servers), and perhaps I&amp;#x27;m missing some subtle nuance here. I&amp;#x27;m not wanting to come off as &amp;quot;screw this, this is stupid&amp;quot;. I&amp;#x27;m just genuinely not understanding why I should learn a new tool (or re-learn an old tool that&amp;#x27;s be &amp;quot;reloaded&amp;quot;) when git does all of this and more...and I already know it and have it installed broadly across my systems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>click170</author><text>&amp;gt; Because, for one thing, &amp;quot;one&amp;quot; sometimes doesn&amp;#x27;t have the computer science degree and years of experience to even begin to understand Git, for one thing.&lt;p&gt;With respect, I call shenanigans on this my good friend.&lt;p&gt;I dropped out of highschool and attended no postsecondary and I don&amp;#x27;t have any problems with Git. I started with the basics and read more as I got myself into tighter and tighter jams.&lt;p&gt;I feel like this myth is perpetuated by a small group of people who are very vocal about &amp;quot;git is hard&amp;quot;. If git commit and git checkout are too complicated, I don&amp;#x27;t know what else to say except that every VCS has those concepts, perhaps you&amp;#x27;re just used to those systems instead.</text></comment>
<story><title>Simple Revision Control</title><url>http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kazinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I am not entirely sure I understand why one wouldn&amp;#x27;t use git for this role.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because, for one thing, &amp;quot;one&amp;quot; sometimes doesn&amp;#x27;t have the computer science degree and years of experience to even begin to understand Git.&lt;p&gt;For many users, using Git means cutting and pasting command line recipes scoured from desperate web searches, and crossing their fingers.&lt;p&gt;This does not go away when you use Git just for personal use with a repo that has no upstream.&lt;p&gt;ESR probably wants something that is simple to use for simple use cases.</text></item><item><author>SwellJoe</author><text>I am not entirely sure I understand why one wouldn&amp;#x27;t use git for this role. If you don&amp;#x27;t need a remote git repository, you don&amp;#x27;t need to use one, and git will be available everywhere. Certainly many production machines will tend to have it for deployment of applications across multiple machines.&lt;p&gt;What are some use cases that don&amp;#x27;t work with git (which is probably already available on the system)? And why wouldn&amp;#x27;t git be an effective tool for that particular role?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m certainly not as experienced as ESR (though, I&amp;#x27;m coming up on 20 years of administering Linux and UNIX servers), and perhaps I&amp;#x27;m missing some subtle nuance here. I&amp;#x27;m not wanting to come off as &amp;quot;screw this, this is stupid&amp;quot;. I&amp;#x27;m just genuinely not understanding why I should learn a new tool (or re-learn an old tool that&amp;#x27;s be &amp;quot;reloaded&amp;quot;) when git does all of this and more...and I already know it and have it installed broadly across my systems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cschmidt</author><text>I sometimes use git this way on local files:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    git init                       # make a local repo
    git add foo.txt                # add the file
    [edit]
    git add -u                     # add changes to commit
    git commit -m&amp;quot;made a change&amp;quot;   # check in changes
    git log                        # see commits
    git status                     # what has changed
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
That&amp;#x27;s really all you need to know.</text></comment>