Well, what's terrifying is that the guide is so long.
I am aware that beej's guides are typically quite comprehensive, but the vast nuances of git truly eluded me until this.
I guess Jujitsu would wind up being a much slimmer guide, or at least one that would be discoverable largely by humans?
It tells me that git is the wrong tool for the majority of people but it just happened to stick.
No. Git is a complex program but version control is an inherently complex problem that requires powerful tools. There's certain set of problems where, as a programmer, you're going to have to sit down and actually read the book.
The universe doesn't owe you an easy 10 minute video solution to everything, it's an annoying educational expectation that people seem to have developed. Some things are just that difficult and you have to learn them regardless.
No. Source control is not that complicated. Git is just bad. As an existence proof: Mercurial is much better and simpler.
I can teach someone who has never even heard of source control how to use Perforce in about 10 minutes. They will never shoot themselves in the foot and they will never lose work. There are certainly more advanced techniques that require additional training. But the basics are very easy.
Git makes even basic things difficult. And allows even experts to shoot their face off with a rocket launcher.
Git sucks. The best tool doesn't always win. If MercurialHub had been founded instead of GitHub we'd all be used a different tool. Alas.
You're welcome to switch back to CVS or RCS at any time. You're also welcome to deal with their specific tradeoffs.
Why not switch forward to Jujutsu? It's simpler and more powerful than Git.
I've been using Jujutsu a little and over the weekend lost a bunch of files. I'd been working happily in an anonymous branch. I had a bunch of content in a thirdparty folder that was hidden by .gitignore. I couldn't figure out how to merge my anonymous branch into master. Somehow wound up on the old master and it deleted all of my gitignored files. Then jj status got totally fubar and couldn't complete in under 5 minutes because something something 7500 files (everything that got deleted, it was compiler toolchains).
It was a disaster. Literally the most important thing for any VCS tool is to never ever delete file I don't want deleted. No more Jujutsu for me.
Someday someone will invent a VCS tool that doesn't suck. Today is not that day.
When updating the working copy from one commit to another, I didn't think we would delete files that were not untracked in the first commit. I suspect the files are actually still available in the repo, but we'd appreciate a bug report if you can reproduce the problem.
The other issue you ran into with ignored files becoming tracked is a known limitation. I agree that it's really annoying. We have talked about it many times before but we didn't have a proper issue for tracking it, so I created one now: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/issues/5596