Re: Subject: [PATCH] Push to create

From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Mar 4, 2009, 17:58 UTC
Message-ID: <20090304175830.GA6305@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0903031118280.6399@intel-tinevez-2-302>

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 11:39:16AM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Only in this case, I would rephrase it to: "Is a usability wart really 
> serious when the guy does not even bother to report it where it can be 
> fixed?"
> 
> It is much harder work to come up with solutions, and that is what I am 
> interested in.  So I'll try very hard to ignore everything else.

Well, I think there is a point hiding behind all of his whining, which is that if you aren't joining a big established project, but are rather the maintainer of an existing project that wants to move over to git, or someone who is starting a new project, and decides to use git because they've heard it's all the rage --- but the tutorials and the documentation don't do that great of a job pointing people to the right place.

For example, the git tutorial's "Using got for collaboration" assumes that Alice and Bob have accounts on the same system. C'mon! Time-sharing systems are so.... 1970's. Granted that arranging SSH access is non-trivial, but there are plenty of web sites that offer free git hosting services: repo.or.oz, gitorious, Github, and now Sourceforge. The tutorial should at least point people at the git hosting sites.

One of the advantages that bzr has is that it is integrated fairly tightly with Launchpad, which has its own bzr hosting service. So the documentation is easier, and with Launchpad's integration into bzr's UI, a bzr user can publish a branch in a single command line (assuming they are a registered launchpad user and have an account on launchpad):

	bzr push lp:~userid/project-name/branch-name

It's going to be hard for git to be able to match this usability, given that we need to do something that works with multiple hosting facilities, and not just tie ourselves to a single system like gitorious, Github, or Sourceforge. (Although I could imagine some kind of plugin/hook system where once the plugin for a particular git hosting facility was installed, git could be much more tightly integrated with a particular hosting service.)

At the very least, though, it should be relatively easy to update our documentation to at least acknowledge the many and varied free git hosting services; it's not like we need to tell people that the only way to share repositories involves setting up an ssh or Apache server.

					- Ted

P.S.  For more details about the bzr/Launchpad integration, see:

http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/en/tutorials/using_bazaar_with_launchpad.html