Re: [ANNOUNCE] Cogito is for sale

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Apr 19, 2007, 20:23 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzm545d0o.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20070419124648.GL4489@pasky.or.cz>

Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I agree that by now, the situation is too confusing and while I'm not
> happy with everything in Git, I believe that by now the best way is to
> just fix Git. Therefore, I'm announcing that I don't plan to add any (at
> least any significant) new features to Cogito. Sorry to all the Cogito
> users, it is a hard decision for me, but by now I believe that it is
> much more effective to just focus on Git.

I applaud this; I know this must have been a hard decision for you to make.

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> About git homepage:
>
> The very least I wanted to do at any rate with git.or.cz ASAP is to
> switch the crash courses to git-oriented ones too. I think git more or
> less got to a reasonable point when this is a sane idea.

I would agree, at this point.

When git.or.cz started offering those introductory pages, the Porcelain-ish scripts (that is correct, "scripts", as there were no "built-in" -- even "git diff" unified driver was a shell script to driver diff-index, diff-files and diff-tree) shipped with the core git was infinitely less pleasant to normal people, especially the ones who have not seen the early days of git core which shipped with almost none. When you and I talked about what text to put on git.or.cz, it was an obvious and easy thing to agree on that newbie documentation should be based on Cogito, and you did all the work to put the site together.

    I am saying this now for new people on the list, as I heard
    an incorrect "theory" that you have been advertising Cogito
    on git.or.cz site against the community's best interest,
    even when nobody seems to talk about it these days on the
    list anymore.

Since the early days of my involvement in git project, I said my goal was to keep the plumbing stable, enhance the plumbing in such a way that any and all Porcelains can do what they want without resorting to Porcelain-specific hacks, so that the resulting repositories can interoperate no matter what Porcelain was used on top of the plumbing. I worded that goal as "make the choice of Porcelains irrelevant". While that ideal still stands, we ended up having rich enough Porcelain in the core distribution. To some people, this might look as if we are making alternative Porcelains irrelevant instead, but that is not the case. Many features and workflows that are now supported by the core Porcelain were first invented outside (e.g. "automated tag following while fetching" came from Cogito), and the core Porcelain does not ship with special purpose features and expect alternative/augmentative Porcelains to fill the niche (an existing example is that people who want patch management use StGIT or guilt). I am reasonably sure that there still are features and workflows that Cogito supports better, and given time and motivated users and contributors, hopefully they will be ported to the core Porcelain.

I would thank you for your effort to ease adoption of git family of tools to new people with Cogito; I would ask the list to do the same.

And I look forward to see your continued involvement to make git better.