Re: [PATCH 3/3] Teach "git branch" about --new-workdir

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jul 25, 2007, 09:39 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0707251024390.14781@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <46A6F21D.2010306@trolltech.com>

Hi,

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Marius Storm-Olsen wrote:

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> Alex Riesen said the following on 25.07.2007 01:15:
>
> > I have to stay with Windows, but I'd absolute hate having their stupid 
> > line-ending by default. As will my project supervisor, and he gets 
> > changes from something like 300 developers. You will definitely get 
> > their votes against changing the default
> 
> Ok, so maybe not changing the default.
> Though it's weird behavior for _most_ Windows developers out there, I agree
> that the current Windows Git population would mostly prefer the Unix line
> endings. And I can see how someone who's working on Windows and handling a lot
> of patches from other developers of multiple OSs also wanting the
> non-platform-standard Unix line-endings.

Even MacOSX saw the light. More and more tools on Windows (not from M$, mind you, they still want to lock you in, and I am continually amazed at the _willingness_ to be locked in!) are behaving sane.

Show 13 quoted lines

> > Marius said:
> >
> > > I believe, especially at the moment, most Git users on Windows are 
> > > mostly developing code in a cross-platform manner, and therefore 
> > > care about this problem.
> > 
> > Yes. They solve it by working fulltime in \n-lineending. Avoiding that 
> > stupid Visual Studio and Notepad helps too.
> 
> Huh? You just removed more than 3 _million_[1] potential users.. (Some say 8
> million [2]) Is that a good argument? Why should developers on Windows avoid
> using Windows tools? Because they're 'idiots'? (ref further down in your
> reply)

When somebody does not want the same as you, it comes natural to think of that person as an idiot. That's psychology, not something rational.

However, I think we are talking about an almost non-issue here: those 3-80 million users "just waiting" for Git probably would not touch it without a complete installer. And that installer could just ask "which line ending do you want to suffer through today?"

Which brings _me_ back to my pet hate: why on earth is _no_ one of those 30-800 billion Windows users trying to do something about the lack of a proper native Windows support for Git? The MinGW port contains commits from these people (skipping everything that is in official git.git):

Johannes Schindelin Johannes Sixt Junio C Hamano Mark Levedahl Simon 'corecode' Schubert

I know for certain that the first person, and also the third person, are not exactly Windows users. I guess not even the last two persons are.

Note that more work has been done on git-gui, because those poor Windows developers are evidently so uncomfortable with the keyboard that a GUI is needed. AFAIK only Johannes Sixt and Shawn Pearce worked on the Windows/git-gui interaction (and again, Shawn is not a Windows user).

Han-Wen made an installer, right, but that installer is lacking bash and perl, and proper testing, because it was just a proof-of-concept. Han-Wen is no Windows user either. I tried to pick up on that work, but unfortunately "gub" (the cross compiling framework he used) is so Pythonesque that I was put off.

So this leaves me with the question: do Windows users really want a proper native Windows support for Git? If the answer is yes, why don't they _do_ (as in "not talk") something about it?

(Let me take a BIG, BIIIIIG exception here: Johannes Sixt has worked long and hard and extremely well on this beast. He is certainly the exception that proves the rule.)

Ciao, Dscho