Re: best git practices, was Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinishedsummary continued

From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 25, 2007, 18:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20071025182358.GA10664@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <1193335339.4522.398.camel@cacharro.xalalinux.org>

On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 01:02:19PM -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 11:21 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> 
> > And of course it's inelegant.  You just told us we were dealing with
> > CVS-brain-damaged corporate developers who can't be bothered to learn
> > about the fine points of using things the git way.
> 
> Ignore the corporate developers who use SCMs only because their company
> requires them to.  Git is not the right thing for them; some
> Eclipse-based monstrosity probably is.  It's like the horrendous
> Oracle-based expense-reporting thing we have to use at Novell; I use it
> because they make me, not because I'm particularly excited about
> reporting expenses :)

I think I misunderstand Andreas' problem statement. What I proposed is useful for corporate developers who are deeply confused by branches, especially when a single working directory is constantly jumping back and forth between several branches. (Having the current branch in your bash prompt is a *big* help here, but we can't count on them having it.)

So setting up a solution where each branch gets its own working directory is a great solution where you have some number of newbie developers in a company that get easily confused, while still providing advanced users the ability to use the full power of git, and giving both the newbie and advanced users the advantages of disconnected operations. And, of course, hopefully some day the newbie users will grow up to become advanced users.

Right now I suspect a number of projects who have picked hg or bzr do so because the traditional git model is too confusing to newbie users. So for those people, creating the model where branch == a separate directory may make life easier for them. That's probably the one thing that bzr does much better than git; it has a number of modes which act as training wheels for the easily confused user. For example, the bzr's "bound branch" requires you to have network access, since anything that modifies the local repository requires hitting the remote server as well. Horrible! Gives you all of the downsides of CVS! But it allows some users to use the SCM is CVS-style mode, while allowing more advanced users to use it in a more distributed mode.

So I think it *is* useful to help the corporate developers, because that means there are more git users --- and someday some of us on this list might have to work at such a company, and better that they use git than something like perforce or Clearcase, right? :-)

> However, *do think* of the free software developers who have been using
> CVS forever.  You won't make friends among them if you keep saying, "you
> use CVS?  You are brain-damaged, then."

Fair enough. I used the term somewhat toungue-in-cheek, and I probably should have said "newbie user" instead.

							- Ted