Re: [PATCH 4/4] gitfaq: add entry about syncing working trees

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Oct 20, 2021, 21:36 UTC
Message-ID: <YXCL6dyhoBA708X0@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cR=wQYthORMfyf4ShBCTXyWkQJqH6YHuW4Uv-Ys3wef5g@mail.gmail.com>

On 2021-10-20 at 01:38:47, Eric Sunshine wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 9:06 PM brian m. carlson
> <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:
> > gitfaq: add entry about syncing working trees
> 
> You sent two [4/4] patches. I'm guessing the one prefixed by "gitfaq:"
> is the correct one.

Yes, I appear to have done a bad cherry-pick.  Will fix in v2.

Show 7 quoted lines

> Considering the potential damage which can result from this sort of
> synching, this entire section seems too gentle. My knee-jerk reaction
> is that it would be better to strongly dissuade upfront rather than
> saying that it's okay to do this if you really want to. As such, I'm
> wondering if organizing the section like this would be better:
> 
> (1) Make a strong statement against doing this: "<strong>Don't do it.</strong>"

I agree this is dangerous. The reason this is so painful is why I long ago stopped having a desktop: I needed to sync in-progress work frequently, and having multiple machines is too much of a hassle for that case. The laptop is more portable and can be used everywhere, even if less powerful.

However, some people do legitimately need to work on the same project across machines, and the current tooling for syncing stashes and other in-progress work is insufficient. Therefore, if we just tell people, "Don't do this," they're going to stop reading and ignore us, because we've neglected their needs and they have a job to do. That would be worse, because instead of using something like rsync, they might use a cloud syncing service, and then they'll be really in a bad place.

However, I'm happy to try the reorganization you proposed, even if I don't necessarily adopt the strength of the proposal, and see how it works.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA