Re: [PATCH 1/9] remote-bzr: trivial cleanups

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 26, 2013, 19:19 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s2SaKe7F-3H=b3ZBgDPDT+TrVPUBLrXg0XDY7n5ppdS0Q@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CALkWK0mRfj1FGYymDrBqQ=d02mhPkevJKr5Ozhgurp8DMhiNjQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 4:32 AM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> Felipe Contreras wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> I do
>> not agree with Ram at all when he says that developers are more
>> important than users, and I agree with you that the project exists
>> for users, and not for developers.
>
> On this.
>
> If Peff were to suddenly stop working on git one day (because he was
> frustrated with the community/ development practices), we'd all lose a
> lot more than if one random end-user switches to using hg for his tiny
> personal projects.

Yeah but that's not happening is it? This is yet another hypothetical. Last I checked Peff never threatened to leave the project. Did I miss a memo?

The last time somebody announced he was going to leave the project we did what was reasonable; investigate the reasons. And that's what we would do if Peff threatened to leave.

But fine, lets assume there's a hypothetical Peff, with hypothetical reasons to leave the project...

Show 7 quoted lines

> I'm _not_ claiming that there's a split between
> users and users that are developers (we have one mailing list for
> everyone, and I like that).  What I'm claiming is that we cannot (and
> should not) pay equal attention to every user of git.  Some users are
> more important than others.  Again, that does _not_ mean that we push
> a change that benefits one important user but breaks everyone else's
> setup.

The importance of users changes all the time. The 15 year old kid in Sao Paulo might not be important today, but he might be the single most important contributor ten years from now. Hell, he might even replace Junio as the maintainer.

Who are you to decide which users are important, and which are not?

> Ofcourse the project exists for its users; we're not doing research.
> However, we don't all have to write tutorials to keep in touch with
> end-users who are completely detached from the development process
> (our time is better spent elsewhere),

Maybe we should, and maybe we would see then some areas of improvement. In fact, I have done so, and I do see lots of areas of improvement in git's UI.

I agree that there are more important areas, or rather, more fun to work with, but the fact that most git developers don't pay too much attention to the pain of newcomers shows, and it's a very common criticism of git; it's difficult to learn, it doesn't have a consistent UI, many commands don't make sense. And I happen to agree with that claim, but it's not an easy problem to solve, specially when you care about *all* users, both old and new, which we do.

We should keep in mind the problems in git's UI for newcomers. There's no reason no to.

Show 6 quoted lines

> or even have an
> end-user-friendly bug tracker (where the SNR is very low).  We don't
> have to consciously reach out to people we're not connected to
> directly: if we're all sufficiently connected to the real world, the
> itches/ bugs worth working on will always find their way to us.  We
> live in a connected world.

Nobody is claiming we need a bug tracker, there's no point in arguing about that. The rate at which we fix bugs or our tracking of them is not a problem.

> Yes, I know.  You're going to respond to this email arguing about why
> you're Right and why I (and everyone else) is Wrong, either by quoting
> what Linus (TM) said and twisting it to mean what you want, belaboring
> over what you've already said, or something similar.

Where did I twist anything? You can see Linus talk himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzKzUBLEzwk

Point me exactly where does he say some users are more important than others, in fact, he is saying the opposite, the amount of people that needed the Linux version compatibility flag was really really small, yet they did it, why? Because *all* users matter. Not that it matters what Linus says, what matters is that it's right; the moment you start balkanizing your user base, the moment you start giving some them reason to fork the project. When was the last time Linux was forked? GNOME did exactly that, they said; you, users over there, we don't care about you anymore, what did they do? Fork. They lost so many users they had to revert their decision.

Should we willingly and knowingly neglect some git user-base? No, why would you want them to fork? In a way, git's UI has been so bad, that some kind-of-forks have happened, that tells us something; the UI needs some love, fortunately none of those forks worked, which tells us something too; it's not too atrocious.

That's not to say we shouldn't fix the UI, we should, in a way that everyone's happy, which is hard, but we will do it, eventually.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras