From: Jan Engelhardt Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:02:53 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] gitignore: warn about pointless syntax Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Tuesday 2012-01-10 08:01, Jan Engelhardt wrote: >> >>You can either adjust the people, i.e. teach that their "false" assumption >>is wrong and the feature they expect is available but not in a way that >>they expect. Or you can adjust the tool to match their expectation. >>[...]in real life, people are harder to train than tools[...] > >Though, having one more way to do things leads to a certain mess at a >later point, if such mess is not already present. I am thinking here of >the precedent iptables option parser set by removing support for >exclamation marks in odd positions, as it was redundant ("more than 1 >way"), was only supported by ~45% of all options and had to be >explicitly invoked at every callsite - so in fact was harder on users >than git would be for **. There were a few mails by people who could not >seem to read error messages, but overall, within 6-9 months, everything >was quiet again. So, that's the empiric result of what teaching-the-tool >would do. ~ teaching-the-user would entail - it's factually problemfree.