Re: What is missing from Git v2.0

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 03:23:54AM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Felipe,

It's clear that you've not been able to produce evidence that can convince most of the people on this thread. Simply repeating the same assertions over and over again, in a shrill fashion, is not likely to convince those of us who that this would not be a good idea for git v2.0.

Creating a ~/.gitconfig file if one doesn't already is one I agree with, and at least on Unix systems, telling them that the config file lives in ~/.gitconfig, or where ever it might happen to be on other platforms, is a good one. If it's in some really weird place on Windows, then sure, we can tell them about "git config -e". But the point is to let the user look at the default .gitconfig file, where we can put in comments to help explain what is going on, and perhaps have links to web pages for more information.

I don't even think we need to query the user to fill out all of the fields. We can prepopulate a lot of the fields (name, e-mail address, etc.) from OS specific defaults that are available on most systems --- specifically, the default values we would use the name and e-mail address are not specified in a config file.

We can just tell the user that we have created a default .gitconfig file, and tell them how they can take a look at it.

In the long term, if the worry is how to bridge the gap between complete newbies, one way of dealing with this is to have a tutorial mode (off by default, on in the default .gitconfig) which despenses some helpful hints at certain strategic points (i.e., after five commits, give a message that introduces git log --oneline, after the third merge commit is created by the user, give a message which introduces git log --merge, and so on). The challenge is not strawing over the line to the point where the hints become as annoying as "clippy", but that is what UX labs are for, to tune the experience for completely new users to git.

Without doing a formal UX experiment, all of us are going to making assertions without formal evidence --- at best some of us who have tutored a few newbies might have some anecdates, but remember the old saying about the plural of anecdote not being data.

Cheers,

						- Ted