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MBlume comments on Tool ideology - Less Wrong
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Hee. We still use subversion every day.
Version control systems nowadays suffer from the problem that all new version control systems are created by groups of hackers working on projects so big and complex that the existing systems aren't powerful enough for them. So you keep getting more and more powerful and complex systems. git is so complex that no one who isn't a software developer can use it correctly.
I was tasked with moving a complex natural-language processing program for the NIH from, I think, SVCS, to git. After three days studying git man pages and trying to explain them to a group of linguists, I gave up and put everything under QVCS, and it was smooth sailing after that.
Git is new. It's already gotten easier to use (I'm already too much of a newb to have ever used the Git of Yore, which supposedly you needed a CS PhD to use effectively), and the folks at GitHub in particular seem to be working hard at sanding down its rough edges.
My experience with git was in 2006 or 2007.
This is quite ancient. git started as a solution to technical problem of high performance distributed version control. They got user interface into something reasonable only later.
It's still not that great. The internal DAG model is quite clean and clear. The actual commands do not always map clearly to this model. One common failure is often hiding or doing implicit magic to the staging area. Another is that many commands are a mish-mash of "manipulate the DAG" and "common user operations", where doing only one or the other would be much clearer. I really doubt that the user interface will get much better, because to do so they really need to throw out backward compatibility.
There are some problem with DAG, too, because you are supposed to store the information with little meta-information.
There are precedents of tools wrapping Git command-line interface, so that part possibly could be fixed. I frankly do not know why nobody does it.