Re: I want to release a "git-1.0"

On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 01:00:42PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
 > 
 > Ok, I'm at the point where I really think it's getting close to a 1.0, and
 > make another tar-ball etc. I obviously feel that it's already way superior
 > to CVS, but I also realize that somebody who is used to CVS may not 
 > actually realize that very easily.
 > 
 > So before I do a 1.0 release, I want to write some stupid git tutorial for
 > a complete beginner that has only used CVS before, with a real example of
 > how to use raw git, and along those lines I actually want the thing to
 > show how to do something useful.
 > 
 > So before I do that, is there something people think is just too hard for
 > somebody coming from the CVS world to understand? I already realized that
 > the "git-write-tree" + "git-commit-tree" interfaces were just _too_ hard
 > to put into a sane tutorial.
 > 
 > I was showing off raw git to Steve Chamberlain yesterday, and showing it
 > to him made some things pretty obvious - one of them being that
 > "git-init-db" really needed to set up the initial refs etc). So I wrote
 > this silly "git-commit-script" to make it at least half-way palatable, but
 > what else do people feel is "too hard"?

I finally got around to actually trying to use git to maintain the cpufreq repository the last few days after reading Jeff Garzik's mini-howto[1]

It's not particularly complicated, but the number one thing that's bugged me is this..

# commit changes
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="John Doe"		\
    GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="jdoe@foo.com"	\
    GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Jeff Garzik"	\
    GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="jgarzik@pobox.com"	\
    git-commit-tree `git-write-tree`	\
    -p $(cat .git/HEAD )			\
    < changelog.txt			\
    > .git/HEAD

For merging a lot of csets, thats a lot of typing per cset. So my .bashrc
now sets up GIT_COMMITTER_NAME & GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL, because I don't
foresee myself changing either of those anytime soon, which takes it down
to
    GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="John Doe"      \
    GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="jdoe@foo.com" \
    git-commit-tree `git-write-tree`    \
    -p $(cat .git/HEAD )            \
    < changelog.txt         \
    > .git/HEAD

per-cset. Maybe I have early on-set dementia, but the number of times I've typoed those two remaining environment variables is bizarre. I must've hit every known combination possible in my merge of ~30 patches.

I could make the latter 4 lines of the above a shell alias to save some typing, but those shell vars still bug me. Hmm, maybe I could create a wrapper that splits a "Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com" style string into two vars.

I realise you've got a nifty bunch of tools to apply a whole mbox of patches, but that's not ideal if all of my patches aren't in mboxes (some I create myself and toss in my spool, some I pull from bugzilla etc..)

Typos aside, the other thing that seems non-intuitive is the splitting up of the patch & changelog comment into seperate files during the patch-apply stage.

Maybe your new git-commit-script wonder-tool fixes up all these problems already, I'll take a look after food.

Its pretty nifty stuff, but for merging a lot of patches in non-mbox format, either I'm doing something wrong, or its, well.. painful.

		Dave

[1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/26/11/index.html