Apologies for the massive and pointless thread

I want to apologize for the recent thread entitled "git on MacOSX and files with decomposed utf-8 file names". I also want to try and explain myself a little. I realize I was wrong in my original post, which was motivated out of offense at having my OS of choice insulted for a design decision. My original goal was to try and get people to understand that both approaches (HFS+ vs basically every other filesystem) are valid, and they accomplish different goals. Unfortunately, my argument seems to have been completely lost in the noise, and everybody ended up with some idea of what my argument was that was completely invalid. Given the prevalence of this mistaken idea, I am forced to admit I must have been at fault in describing my viewpoint, but the fact still stands that most of what everybody was arguing against was not, in fact, my viewpoint.

I am a stubborn man, as I believe most of you are. When someone argues against a mistakenly-attributed viewpoint, I feel compelled to correct their belief as to what my viewpoint really is. I realize this is pretty much hopeless, and I only served to clutter the list. However, the same can be said about most of the replies to me.

Eventually I realized my mistake, and attempted to steer the thread towards discussion on potential solutions. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to want to follow me. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, people had already invested too much into telling me why I was wrong. But I do think it was a missed opportunity to get some real work done. And no, I was not, nor was I ever, asking people to write code for me. I was asking for a discussion on potential solutions, since you all know far more than I do about how git works, and thus you are much better suited towards evaluating potential solutions than I am. I'm sorry if I did not make my desires clear enough.

Despite what you may think, I did learn things in that thread. I sincerely hope this situation won't preclude my involvement in the git project and community in the future. I've only been using git a short time but I've learned a lot in that time, and I'd like to help the project to succeed.

So once again, I am very sorry for what I have caused here.

-Kevin Ballard

Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> writes:

[...]

You still consider everybody who does not share your point of view an idiot. And telling people that is not going to change their mind. You need to come up with an argument that convinces anybody, and "the designers are smart people, they must have thought something smart even though I don't actually get it myself" does not convince anybody. And that has been your main argument.

And you consider others dense for not accepting it?