Re: Terminology question about remote branches.

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 5, 2007, 16:23 UTC
Message-ID: <85bqdm6jch.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <20070805154801.GD28263@thunk.org>

Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> To use a GNU emacs example, consider M-x customize, which is this
> huge, very fancy, *very* complex hierarchical mechanism with a
> pointy-clicky interface for setting options.  Most emacs experts
> wouldn't use it, preferring to open code raw emacs-lisp settings in
> their .emacs.el.  If you ask an old-time emacs user how to set up
> some specific feature setting via M-x customize, they might look at
> you blankly, because it's not an interface they use much, if at all.

Well, let me throw you back one of your questions: do you have any statistics backing this up?

As to anecdotal evidence: I am an old-time Emacs user, and I pretty much use customize _exclusively_ since it generally leaves me with a _working_ configuration even when the DOC string might be sub-optimal or misleading or hard to understand, and it makes sure that, say, everything to make a global minor mode _active_ (like loading some file, or calling some initialization functions) is done at the right point of time.

If "old-time Emacs users" would not use customize, why would pretty much _every_ package come with _working_ defcustoms? Who writes and _tests_ those defcustoms if not the "old-time Emacs users"?

Show 6 quoted lines

> A similar thing can be said of "git branch"; once you are familiar
> with how git works at a conceptual level, it can often be
> faster/easier to just hack the .git/config file directly, instead of
> using "git branch" to set up things the way you want.  And I'm
> pretty sure there are ways to set up the config file when you edit
> it by hand that you can't set up via "git branch".

Sure. But we don't want to _require_ this sort of special knowledge before one can even hope to do some basic task.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum