Making Git easy to use -- without RTFM, was Re: [PATCH] Proof-of-concept patch to remember what the detached HEAD was

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Oct 27, 2009, 10:33 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0910271118470.4985@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>
In-Reply-To: <20091027124156.6117@nanako3.lavabit.com>

Hi,

[culling the Cc: list, as this subthread is probably irrelevant most of the previous members]

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, Nanako Shiraishi wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Quoting Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
> 
> [actually not, Nanako quoted Junio here, I guess]
>
> > I suspect the above is another example of your needing to do a better 
> > job explaining yourself here, but from "just commit all the changes 
> > without saying message", my knee-jerk reaction is "git commit -a -m 
> > 'no message'".
> 
> > You would need to justify why -m 'no message' does not fit the bill 
> > better than just saying "is very sensible to ask for these things", as 
> > I highly suspect that I misunderstood what "these things" are in your 
> > five lines to come up with that "solution" that you are now going to 
> > explain why that is not what the end user wanted.  And in this case, I 
> > do not think it is that me being disconnected from the real world, but 
> > that your explanation is insufficient.
> 
> I'm also curious about the situation when a commit with no message is 
> useful, but unfortunately I don't think I saw you explained clearly 
> enough what this user request wanted to achieve or what "these things" 
> in your message were for us to understand why it is a sensible and valid 
> thing to ask.

I am sure that your creative mind does not need my concrete example to come up with a situation where an empty commit message is useful.

Anyhow, here it is: one of my users refused to touch SCMs _at all_, for decades. There was only one choice: have a Git branch with a purely linear history that contains the copy of the working tree at the end of the day, with whatever changes accumulated over the day, or no history at all.

Sure, some people will now argue that it should be easy to educate that user to use Git properly. But that is as naive as it would be to try to educate those people so they know how unrealistic educating users is. Not because users are not intelligent -- they are -- but because they want to spend their time in a more efficient manner than to learn how to operate a version control system.

You know, when there is a hurdle half of the people you see cannot get over, there are some who make the hurdle half as high, and there are others who put more hurdles there and call it a sport.

In this case, I would have preferred to make the hurdle half as high, but I think I just have to wait a couple of years; reality will take care of things.

Ciao, Dscho