Second, where are all these points whenever someone asks about git? All you ever seem to get in return are fanboys trumpeting git as the second coming, even here on HN.
where are all these points whenever someone asks about git?
If you go looking for rough edges in an open-source Unix power tool that's under development... you're going to find them.
Based on my research (but, please note, not much actual experience) git submodules are ugly, confusing, and perhaps even dangerous in the hands of anyone but an expert. I avoid them. That said, it appears that lots of Rails developers use them every day and can't live without them. Should this feature have been kept out of the official git release, just because it's still being worked out? Not an easy question to answer. Every project maintainer has a different philosophy about such things, and there are a lot of judgement calls to be made.
My issue is not that they exist. I've got no problem with warts in software. I don't think there's a project anywhere that doesn't have some sort of issue.
What I take issue with however is that these warts get conveniently forgotten in the buzz. Even worse, I'd be willing to bet that most of those rails dev's have no idea what is solid and what's a work in progress; they're being done a disservice, really.
I suppose my concern is that there's a fine line between enthusiasm and hype, and it's difficult to know when you've crossed the line.
What I take issue with however is that these warts get conveniently forgotten in the buzz
The problem, to paraphrase Tolstoy, is that happy users are all alike, but every unhappy user is unhappy in her own way.
It's easy to write a review that talks about the core features that a tool gets right. Everyone cares about those features, and everyone uses them, and they're well documented. It is much harder to write a review containing a categorical list of warts. Warts are incidental problems that only bother a subset of users. (If they bothered absolutely everybody, they wouldn't be called warts; they'd have a different name: bugs or misfeatures.)
Worse, one person's wart is another person's feature. Legions of people have complained, over the decades, that rm has a horrible and dangerous UI which lets you accidentally erase your entire machine by typing a stray space at the wrong time. But, somehow, rm persists, because there are plenty of power users who like it.
There are warts and there are warts. When there are warts in some kind of cool experimental toy, that's one thing, but there are other systems that should be as solid and reliable as possible. Things like backups, and, yeah, version control.
Second, where are all these points whenever someone asks about git? All you ever seem to get in return are fanboys trumpeting git as the second coming, even here on HN.