Re: Re* [PATCH] doc: glossary: add entry for revision range

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 18, 2021, 12:47 UTC
Message-ID: <YKO3eeNPxCwvIkEw@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <60a3a808d7eeb_151987208bb@natae.notmuch>

On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 06:42:00AM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> A random github.com link doesn't show anything. The instructions I'm
> talking about are the **first** thing the site gives to users.

I would think the first thing most users see is _somebody else's repository_, full of commits, that they then clone.

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> > People clone a lot more than they create new repositories.
> 
> Depends what you call "people". If you are talking about professional
> software developers, then maybe.
> 
> But they are not the only users of git.
> 
> Do you have any stats?

On one of GitHub's servers (selected randomly), there were ~300k clones in the past 24 hours. In the same time period on the same server, there were 1780 new repos. Even that's overstating it, since some portion of those are just forks of existing repos (so the user probably either cloned their fork immediately, or was already working on a clone of the upstream fork, rather than having run "git init" locally).

Show 9 quoted lines

> > I don't think that proves anything except that your workflow is
> > different than mine.
> 
> Exactly, and we cannot assume most people follow your workflow. In fact,
> I'd say your workflow is probably one of the most atypical in the world.
> You know tricks 99.99% of users don't know about, in fact that probably
> 99% of git.git developers don't know.
> 
> It is sufficient to acknowledge that there are different workflows.

I'm not making some bizarre claim about workflows. I'm saying that people commonly use "git clone" to get repositories. That really doesn't seem controversial.

But you know what, I've wasted enough time on this thread. If you want to believe that people don't use "git clone", go for it.

-Peff