---------------------------------------- Response: Papa and Git September 06th, 2017 ---------------------------------------- Papa phlogged [0] about breaking down and finally learning git. I have read a few things recently on the bboard at SDF and on Mastodon about people's preference for older VCS's like RCS over git. There's a general sentiment that it's 'too much' or 'too complex' for the needs of the individual. I wholeheartedly disagree with both points. Too difficult/complex: While git is definitely different than the VCS's that came before it, I can't call it difficult at all for a community that regularly operates retro operating systems and deals with archaic source packages on a daily basis. I recommend reading the first six or seven chapters of The Git Book [1], freely available online. It can be read in an hour or two and will give all the background necessary to use git reasonably well. Too much for individual needs: Git gives the full power of version control in a local environment. You can use literally everything in the toolbox when you're offline in your basement or on a cruise or wherever. You don't need to connect to the internet to commit that last change, or cherry-pick a fix from another branch you were playing around with for fun. That's amazing! It's also absolutely fantastic to have an an individual. I drop nearly everything I do in the shell into a git repo. This gopher hole? Yep, it's in git. Why? Why not!? Every phost is versioned, as are my experiments. If I want to do something bananas, I create a new branch and give it a go. Didn't work out? I'll swap back to master and carry on. That experimental shenanigans is in version control now and one day I may go play around with it again. In some cases I back up these git repos to a remote, like bitbucket, that allows for free private repos, but not always. Sometimes I'm just playing around with an email, or taking notes on something I'm reading. I create a folder, init git, and type away. Git is like a silent partner there to help me out in whatever I might need. 90% of the time, that means I run: $ git init $ git add $ git commit -m ' And that's about it. Once in a blue moon I'll bust out some logs or check out an old commit to grab at something old. For instance, earlier today I was trying to remember some settings I had been using with Lastpass-CLI when I was using mutt. I had that in my dotfiles repo about 6 months ago, so I just jumped to a commit from around that time and grabbed the code I needed. This response got away from me. TL;DR: Git is awesome. Not difficult at all. Great for personal use. [0] gopher://grex.org/0/~papa/pgphlog/afu-Inevitable_git [1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 .