Design of the VCS is almost fine. "Almost" because I would prefer to track renames, but I can live without that.
The CLI is horrible.
> I'm interested to hear
Someone used wrong command-line switch, and the merge commit was made in wrong way, destroying changes made in other branch. Then feature branch was deleted I think.
I don't know or care who did that or what was the command-line switch, the point is, the thing is too fragile.
People aren't perfect, they make mistakes. Good interfaces are designed in a specific way, to reduce the probability and consequences of these mistakes. In some areas like flight control I think there're even laws about that.
What you described can't happen. If you merge one branch into another, both branches must exist in the repo. Deleting the feature branch following a merge, wouldn't delete the commits it contained. But even if that weren't the case. That means multiple people would have needed to all delete their feature branch without checking the code they wrote was merged and working. rm can delete code too, would you blame rm for having a confusing interface you just couldn't understand?
Come to think about it, git does warn you when you tried to delete a branch that's not merged into any other branch.
> That means multiple people would have needed to all delete their feature branch
That switch might have done something about rewriting history. Or maybe it was rebase, I never do either of these things. Multiple people (except me) have synchronized after that happened. If interested how we fixed — I’ve copy-pasted couple commands from a chat, sent by a co-worker who knows more about git. These commands pushed my local branch under a new name, then people managed to sort it out with a merge.
Design of the VCS is almost fine. "Almost" because I would prefer to track renames, but I can live without that.
The CLI is horrible.
> I'm interested to hear
Someone used wrong command-line switch, and the merge commit was made in wrong way, destroying changes made in other branch. Then feature branch was deleted I think.
I don't know or care who did that or what was the command-line switch, the point is, the thing is too fragile. People aren't perfect, they make mistakes. Good interfaces are designed in a specific way, to reduce the probability and consequences of these mistakes. In some areas like flight control I think there're even laws about that.