Adding metadata will probably make the whole model a bit messy and a lot less reliable.

Only darcs got this right. The problem with darcs was that it got everything else wrong…

I was mostly replying to the “ChangeLog workflow is wrong” bit – i.e. the git log should should suffice as a ChangeLog and you can clean up your commits to give a nice log before pushing to the upstream repo.

Don’t get me wrong, though – figuring out how to make git slightly less insanely difficult to learn is worth doing, but encouraging a slightly different workflow should be a part of that, IMHO

Some quick comments on the other sections:

– “no way I’m keeping all my stuff locally” – sounds to me like you want to keep
your own personal backup repo on a server and push regularily to that, not
necessarily push all your work-in-progress stuff upstream. Looking at the
“git-push” manpage and the “git-remote” manpage, I bet you could set things
up so you could just do “git-push backup” – e.g.

[remote "backup"]
url = ssh://hp@gnome.org/git/foo
refspec = *

It’d be cool if this was easier, but the difference with git is that you probably
don’t want to push everything upstream this way, you just want to backup to
another git repo somewhere.

– “Deleting a remote branch” … “surprising syntax” – notting recently found
that syntax by accident, and we had a fun half hour restoring his branch
again

– “–force” and “screwing things up” – I think git-push –force is mainly there
so that you can push a “rebased” tree … i.e. because you’ve rewritten history,
the head you’re pushing isn’t an ancestor of the remote head, so it’s not a
fast-forward push.

The kernel guys are constantly getting into a flap about people using rebase
too much, e.g. on public trees that a bunch of other people have based their
work on. I reckon they’ll figure out one of these days how to make it so that
some metadata is retained during rebasing so that rebasing isn’t such a
“break the world event” … and then –force wouldn’t be needed to push a
rebased tree.

I have never understood how “oh, but it does this other cool thing” is an answer to “xyz aspect of git kind of blows”

I do definitely enjoy the ability to do the after-the-fact commit rearrangement.