Re: Make "git clone" less of a deathly quiet experience

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Feb 11, 2006, 04:37 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0602102032410.3691@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0602102018250.3691@g5.osdl.org>

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> Instead, it at least prints out how much data it's gotten, and what the 
> packign speed is. Which makes the user realize that it's actually doing 
> something useful instead of sitting there silently (and if the recipient 
> knows how large the final result is, he can at least make a guess about 
> when it migt be done).

Btw, we should print out the other "stages" too - the checkout in particular can be a big part of the overhead, and it would probably make sense to tell people about the fact that "hey, now we're checking the result out, we're not actually trying to destroy your disk".

Quite often, the way to make users happy is not by being impossibly fast or beautiful or otherwise wonderful, but by just _managing_ their expectations, so that they don't say "that's some slow crud", but instead say "Ok, it's a nice program, and it's doing a lot of hard work for me".

It takes me 15 minutes to clone a kernel repo over the network. Once I can see that most of that is getting a 106MB pack-file at 146 kB/s, I say "ok, that's fairly reasonable".

			Linus