Re: [PATCH] Invert numbers and names in the git-shortlog summary mode.

From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Date: Dec 11, 2007, 15:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20071211154841.GA29805@elte.hu>
In-Reply-To: <20071211152412.GB15448@artemis.madism.org>

* Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> > which is quite a bit confusing to someone who'd like to keep as few 
> > details of command line arguments in his head as possible :-)
> 
> Because git-shortlog insists on you passing a reference first, HEAD is 
> not implicit if you pass something that looks like a path first. This 
> is arguably wrong. What you meant here is:
> 
> $ git-shortlog -n -s HEAD kernel/
> 
> The reason IIRC is that git-shortlog once only read things on stdin, 
> and this keeps backward compatbility to `git-shortlog` without any 
> arguments.
> 
> Sometimes history hurts :) I don't think there is much we can do on a 
> short timescale. Maybe the old way can be slowly deprecated, and then 
> git-shortlog will be able to act like git-log.

if we are growing legacies in git this fast it will turn itself into CVS very quickly, give or take 20 years ;-) I think a straightforward usage model is paramount, so phasing out such inconsistencies as early as possible in the project's lifetime should be a priority IMHO. Git has a very, very 'refreshing' approach to information management, and that should permeate it all across. It's easy to be "fresh" in the beginning of a project - maintaining freshness for years is a lot harder. (i dont suggest to break compatibility, but to be aware of such inconsitencies and make it a priority to get rid of them. It does not help that such inconsistencies are only apparent to git newbies.)

another thing i noticed that bites git newbies is that there are commands that do not do the "obvious" thing (to a newbie) and there are commands that just dont tell what they are doing. It would be very helpful if git was just a little bit more verbose about what it does. I.e. use the standard output for ... actual output, and there will be an instant and pleasant feedback loop between newbie and tool.

It should basically "teach" the user along the way about what is being done, so that it quickly becomes an automatism. Especially where concepts differ from legacy SCMs. When is the index updated, when do files get modified, how branching works, etc.

for example, if i type "git-checkout" in a Linux kernel tree, it just sits there for up to a minute, and "does nothing". That is totally wrong, human-interaction wise. Then after a minute it just returns. What happened? Why? Where? A newbie would then try "git-checkout -v", using the well-established "verbose" flag, but that gives:

 Usage: /usr/bin/git-checkout [-q] [-f] [-b <new_branch>] [-m] [<branch>] [<paths>...]

That's what a newbie asks. We are trying to turn the world of SCM's upside down with git, and we should do that by teaching things gradually and by being very explicit what happens and why, when a command is typed ;-)

i could go on and on with other examples. (should I ? ;-)

It's small, little details like that and if we fix a few dozen of them it will do _wonders_ to user education, really. The best tools are the ones that emit just about information to essentially give a tutorial to the newbie about the philosophy and workings of the tool - without being annoying to advanced users. It flattens the learning curve and increases adoption rate enormously. It also helps people learn their way out of the mental deformations that CVS causes ;-)

And we could do this by adding a -q "quiet" flag, to restore the current 'silent' behavior of git. I could then do this in my .bashrc:

   alias git='git -q'

to get the old, quiet behavior. This issue is pretty much the only conceptual advantage i can see of the competition like hg/mercurial ;-)

Ok, enough ranting for today i guess =B-)

	Ingo