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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 25, 2007, 20:40 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707251327390.3607@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <200707251205.48235.andyparkins@gmail.com>

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Andy Parkins wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> I don't disagree with you at all - it is completely ridiculous for Windows 
> users to moan about lack of Windows support without contributing any help.  
> However, I think there is a good reason.
> 
> I think it's a chicken and egg problem.  The only reason I started making 
> (small) contributions to git was because I was using it already.

I think this is 100% true, and worth repeating.

A lot of people seem to think that open source is about having lots of people help with the project, and that development happens much faster that way.

But what people often seem to miss is that pretty much all projects didn't start out "open source". They *all* started out as somebodys personal project (where "somebody" could be a small group, not just an individual, of course), and while maybe the _license_ was open source from the beginning, you cannot get away from the fact that in order to actually be developed as open source, in the end some *individual* has to just do it.

No project ever gets useful help until it's already useful. Being open source doesn't get you past that hump - it only helps you *after* you've already gotten past it.

Now, admittedly, I think one issue with Windows is that the "hump" is simply much bigger. The initial cost (not necessarily in money, but in effort) of getting involved in a development process is just a *lot* higher for Windows users than it is for just about any UNIX.

If you're on some unix platform, the cost of getting involved is basically that the project should already work to some degree, and then there may be some relatively *trivial* issues with making sure that you've got a compiler installed and the basic libraries. But that's really quite easy on just about any UNIX, to the point that most people don't even have to think about it.

In contrast, on Windows that "hump" is a whole lot harder. You don't just have to have a compiler, you have to have some *specific* compiler, because under Windows, they all have different development environments, and few projects support them all.

So you have a double whammy: not only are people doing less development on Windows to start with (so the project itself is likely not as usable), but something as totally *trivial* as getting a simple C development environment isn't even trivial. And git makes it worse by requiring a very odd component (in Windows terms): the shell.

I really hope we'll get the the C rewrite merged soon. Especially the big ones, ie commit / merge / am / clone / fetch. Those are the complex ones that it's hard to get excited about when they don't work. Once those work well, you could probably use git pretty completely even without shell, even if you'd be missing a few features - and those features would now be small enough that a relative beginner can cut their teeth on them.

The good news seems to be that most of those big scripts already exist in a C version, so it's not like it's some utopian dream any more.

But getting a development environment is still much more painful under Windows than just about anywhere else.

			Linus