Join us to discuss learning git on Monday 5th October at 2pm

The use of git is widespread in software engineering, however many novices struggle to get to grips with its complex distributed information model, challenging command line syntax and leaky abstractions. To investigate these pitfalls, we’ll be talking about a paper published by Santiago Perez De Rosso and Daniel Jackson on Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git at OOPSLA. [1] From the abstract:

Git is a widely used version control system that is powerful but complicated. Its complexity may not be an inevitable consequence of its power but rather evidence of flaws in its design. To explore this hypothesis, we analysed the design of Git using a theory that identifies concepts, purposes, and misfits. Some well-known difficulties with Git are described, and explained as misfits in which underlying concepts fail to meet their intended purpose. Based on this analysis, we designed a reworking of Git (called Gitless) that attempts to remedy these flaws.

To correlate misfits with issues reported by users, we conducted a study of Stack Overflow questions. And to determine whether users experienced fewer complications using Gitless in place of Git, we conducted a small user study. Results suggest our approach can be profitable in identifying, analysing, and fixing design problems.

So what’s wrong with git?

Santiago’s presentation on What’s Wrong With Git? at Git Merge in 2017

Details of the zoom meeting have been posted on our slack workspace, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for further information. Thanks to Juha Sorva at Aalto University for recommending this paper.

Journal club dates for your diary

We’ll be meeting on the first Monday of every month throughout autumn, so if you’d like to join us next month or a subsequent month, add these journal club dates to your diary:

  • Monday 5th October at 2pm
  • Monday 2nd November at 2pm
  • Monday 7th December at 2pm

References

  1. Santiago Perez De Rosso and Daniel Jackson (2016) Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, (OOPSLA), pages 292–310 DOI: 10.1145/2983990.2984018