When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a software user to disparage a thoroughly hostile DVCS, there is no recourse but to blog about it. Thus, software diplomacy has failed, and we must face the fact that I irredeemably hate git. To prove this, let these facts be submitted to a candid world.

• git has destroyed our data.
• git has destroyed our data remotely.
• git has forced us to learn gitology.
• git has coerced us to memorise --many --unrelated --options. For suposedly the same command.
• git has made us use a thoroughly unintuitive user interface with badly named commands.
• git has produced horrible documentation.
• git has written and suggested we read Git for Computer Scientists. Several times.
• git has created the largest unavoidable worldwide gang of users, and we must use git if we wish to collaborate with them.
• git has obscured safer, easier, and just as powerful alternatives.

We, therefore, appealing to the wellbeing of all software users, do in the name and by the authority of all distributed version control system decency, solemnly publish and declare that git really fucking sucks, that the previous obscene intensifier was fully necessary, and that we should do all that is within our power to reduce and minimise the proliferation of git usage.

Why I must write this

Before I proceed with my study of git hate, I must first present an apologia for why I am writing this.

You may tell me, “fine, you hate git, don’t use it. It’s just your personal preference.” Normally, for any other software I use out of personal preference, I would agree. I am a student of the Church of Emacs, but this does not mean I think everyone should use Emacs. As long as you produce text, I don’t care how you do it. You can use your text editor of choice, I can use mine, and we will both be happy doing so.

Unfortunately, the same does not hold for git. Although git can be used in isolation without ever collaborating with anyone else (after all, it is a distributed version control system, so this makes it easy to use without other people or a remote server), this is not its primary use case. If everyone around me is using git, then I am too coerced to learn git if I want to collaborate with their software development. You may argue that I can use another DVCS because everything can convert back and forth to git, but interoperability can only go so far. Eventually someone uses a feature of git that another DVCS doesn’t implement, and I will have to use git anyway.

Moreover, it is clear that git is creating a community of people who are faffing around learning gitology and feeling good about themselves for understanding abstruse concepts which are completely orthogonal to actually getting work done. This is evidenced by all the blog posts written by people being frustrated with git. As the renowned 20th century mathematician G. H. Hardy once wrote, “it is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician, is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.” In a similar vein, it’s a melancholy experience that we spend so much time blogging about how to use git, reading blogs about how to use git, and joke about using git, instead of getting work done. Without git.

Because everyone else is wasting their time praising and discussing git, the aptly-named stupid content tracker, I must now waste my own time to point out how blockheaded it is that we spend so much time learning the tool that should be tangential to our work and ultimately unrelated to our actual work.

What will not be hated on

I want to make it perfectly clear that I will direct my hatred at git and at git only. In particular, none of the following will receive any direct dosage of hatred:

• github
• magit
• git Tower
• gitg
• TortoiseGit
• Your Favourite non-commandline Interface to Git
• Whatever other tool for tracking content that happens to use git as a database or whatever

I want to make this clear, because these tools above are the reason many people claim to love git. But just because good tools have been built on a horrible core doesn’t mean the core is good. As an example I will frequently come back to, C++ is a horrible language, but many good tools and frameworks have been built on top of it.

To all the hardcore git lovers out there, git is neither necessary nor sufficient for building all of the tools you probably love that have been built on top of git. The facilities git provides to build these tools on top of it could have been provided by any other DVCS. We can and should do better than git without sacrificing any of the things you love about git, other than whatever tool has been built on top of it.

Furthermore, I also want to make this very clear: the ultimate enemy is centralised version control, not git. CVCSes are what’s really slowing our collaboration down. git is only the major enemy within the DVCS camp, but if you’re forced to choose git over any CVCS, and git is really the only choice for a DVCS for you (this is rarely true, but I’m speaking hypothetically here), then, yes, choose git. It is by far the lesser of two evils in this hypothetical Catch-22.

What will be offered instead

I will frequently cite Mercurial, abbreviated hg, as an alternative to git. I contend that Mercurial is a safer, saner, better designed, and no less powerful alternative to git. While it may be true that Bitbucket, the major non-free provider of Mercurial hosting often compared to Github, may not fulfill the requirements you have come to expect from Github, this is not due to any limitation of hg itself. As I said, I want to only argue that git as a building block is rotten, but this is not directly related to how people have managed to polish this particular turd.

I do not, however, want to be taken as simply a an admirer of hg who is used to an hg workflow and thus hates git simply because git is not hg. I will make a thorough effort to present sound arguments for the myriad reasons why git sucks that will stand on their own without comparing them to hg. When I am finished expounding my revulsion for git, I will offer alternatives that hg or perhaps another DVCS offers that demonstrate that git’s ugliness is not necessary.

Necessary. This is also a word I will come back to often. A central theme of my attack is that is that all the complications that git has created are not necessary. In order to demonstrate this, I need to offer examples of where git’s equivalent functionality exists without the parts of git that are not necessary. This is why I will frequently cite hg.

So, enough with the meta. Let’s get on to the hating itself.