Overview

Git

Stacks343.6K

Followers184.2K

Votes6.6K

GitHub Stars57.1K

Forks26.9K

Gitless

Stacks4

Followers18

Votes0

Git vs Gitless: What are the differences?

Introduction

Git and Gitless are both version control systems used for managing and tracking changes to files in software development projects. Although they serve the same purpose, there are key differences between the two.

Integration with existing Git workflows: Git integrates seamlessly with existing Git workflows and allows developers to use Git commands directly. In contrast, Gitless provides a simplified subset of Git commands and introduces new commands that attempt to make the version control process more intuitive and user-friendly.
Explicit commits and branches: Git requires developers to explicitly create commits and branches, making it easier to track changes and manage work in progress. Gitless, on the other hand, follows a more implicit approach by automatically committing changes and creating temporary branches, which may confuse some users accustomed to the explicit nature of Git.
Simplified commit history: Gitless provides a simplified and linear commit history by automatically squashing multiple commits into a single commit. This can help to make the commit history cleaner and easier to understand. In contrast, Git retains the full commit history, including all individual commits, providing a more detailed overview of the development process.
Reversible operations: Gitless introduces reversible operations, allowing users to easily undo changes without the need for complex Git commands. This can be particularly useful for beginners or individuals who are not familiar with the intricacies of Git's revert and reset commands.
Built-in staging area: Git includes a staging area that allows developers to selectively stage changes before committing them. Gitless simplifies this process by automatically staging all changes, eliminating the need for manual staging. While this reduces complexity, it also removes the flexibility and granularity offered by Git's staging area.
Collaboration with Git users: Gitless is designed to be compatible with Git, meaning that Git users can interact with Gitless repositories and vice versa. This allows for collaboration between teams using different version control systems, making it easier to work together on projects.

In Summary, Git and Gitless differ in their integration with existing Git workflows, the explicitness of commits and branches, the handling of commit history, the availability of reversible operations, the presence of a staging area, and the compatibility with Git.

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Advice on Git, Gitless

Kamaldeep

CEO at Zhoustify Agency

Nov 13, 2020

Decided

SVN is much simpler than git for the simple stuff (checking in files and updating them when everyone's online), and much more complex than git for the complicated stuff (branching and merging). Or put another way, git's learning curve is steep up front, and then increases moderately as you do weird things; SVN's learning curve is very shallow up front and then increases rapidly.

If you're storing large files, if you're not branching, if you're not storing source code, and if your team is happy with SVN and the workflow you have, I'd say you should stay on SVN.

If you're writing source code with a relatively modern development practice (developers doing local builds and tests, pre-commit code reviews, preferably automated testing, preferably some amount of open-source code), you should move to git for two reasons: first, this style of working inherently requires frequent branching and merging, and second, your ability to interact with outside projects is easier if you're all comfortable with git instead of snapshotting the outside project into SVN.

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Detailed Comparison

Git	Gitless
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.	Gitless is an experiment to see what happens if you put a simple veneer on an app that changes the underlying concepts. Because Gitless is implemented on top of Git (could be considered what Git pros call a "porcelain" of Git), you can always fall back on Git.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 26.9K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 343.6K	Stacks 4
Followers 184.2K	Followers 18
Votes 6.6K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 1429 Distributed version control system 1053 Efficient branching and merging 959 Fast 843 Open source 726 Better than svn Cons 16 Hard to learn 11 Inconsistent command line interface 9 Easy to lose uncommitted work 8 Worst documentation ever possibly made 5 Awful merge handling	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Git, Gitless?

Mercurial

Mercurial is dedicated to speed and efficiency with a sane user interface. It is written in Python. Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds.

SVN (Subversion)

Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.

Plastic SCM

Plastic SCM is a distributed version control designed for big projects. It excels on branching and merging, graphical user interfaces, and can also deal with large files and even file-locking (great for game devs). It includes "semantic" features like refactor detection to ease diffing complex refactors.

Pijul

Pijul is a free and open source (AGPL 3) distributed version control system. Its distinctive feature is to be based on a sound theory of patches, which makes it easy to learn and use, and really distributed.

DVC

It is an open-source Version Control System for data science and machine learning projects. It is designed to handle large files, data sets, machine learning models, and metrics as well as code.

Magit

It is an interface to the version control system Git, implemented as an Emacs package. It aspires to be a complete Git porcelain. While we cannot (yet) claim that it wraps and improves upon each and every Git command, it is complete enough to allow even experienced Git users to perform almost all of their daily version control tasks directly from within Emacs. While many fine Git clients exist, only deserve to be called porcelains.

Replicate

It lets you run machine learning models with a few lines of code, without needing to understand how machine learning works.

isomorphic-git

It is a pure JavaScript reimplementation of git that works in both Node.js and browser JavaScript environments. It can read and write to git repositories, fetch from and push to git remotes (such as GitHub), all without any native C++ module dependencies.

Git Reflow

Reflow automatically creates pull requests, ensures the code review is approved, and squash merges finished branches to master with a great commit message template.