Research project by Santiago Perez De Rosso and Daniel Jackson of the Software Design Group

Undergraduate students: Steven Diaz (UROP FT19), Jesse Sharps (UROP ST14)

Gitless is an experimental version control system built on top of Git. Many people complain that Git is hard to use. We think the problem lies deeper than the user interface, in the concepts underlying Git. Gitless is an experiment to see what happens if you put a simple veneer on an app that changes the underlying concepts to make it easier to learn and use.

For more information see the Gitless's website

Publications

• Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git
  S. P. De Rosso and D. Jackson. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2016)
• What's Wrong with Git? A Conceptual Design Analysis
  S. Perez De Rosso and D. Jackson. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming & Software (Onward! 2013)

Press

• TechBlog: Santiago Perez De Rosso on Git, reimagined. NatureJobs Blog, March 31, 2017
• Making it easier to collaborate on code. MIT News, October 25, 2016
• Gitless simplifies Git version control. InfoWorld, October 13, 2016
• Gitless: a version control system. Hacker News, October 2, 2016
• Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git. Hacker News, October 1, 2016
• Other mentions of Gitless: a review of the paper on NWIT, a discussion on the git mailing list

Talks

• What's Wrong with Git? (video)
  Santiago Perez De Rosso. Git Merge 2017. Brussels, Belgium. Feb, 2017

Acknowledgments

This research is part of a collaboration between MIT and SUTD (the Singapore University of Technology and Design), and is funded by a grant from SUTD's International Design Center. Thank you also to the users of Gitless for their enthusiasm, bug reports, feature requests, and code contributions.