Re: New sync'd branch

[Óscar Fuentes]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Finally, git's UI is horrid: complex, barroque, with plenty of
>> opportunities for shooting yourself on the feet.
>
> But there is the reflog.  After shooting yourself in the foot, you
> always have the option of going back to before the shot.
>
> Yes, it is reasonably easy to blow up some operation terribly if you
> don't know what you are doing.  Because git has lots of power.  But you
> always can tell it: "Ok, this was a complete messup.  Give me back what
> I had 20 minutes ago".

I'll really apreciate a tool that does not make me waste those 20
minutes.

It's true that bzr is appreciably slower than git doing common
operations: diff and annotate is intantaneous in git (on GNU/Linux),
takes a few seconds on bzr. But when I screw my git setup, the time that
takes me to fix it is much longer than the time I lost waiting for bzr.

> It is very hard to actually do something which can't be undone.  You
> have to really try.

And this is different from other VCSs how?

>> Those kernel guys are not the right people for designing UIs.
>
> Which is why there are different user interfaces on top of the raw git.
> git-gui does quite a few nice things, various Emacs modes as well.

Agreed.

>> Some day people will recognize this and will see today's massive
>> leaning towards git as a mistake originated on juvenile reverence
>> towards its original author and on simplistic metrics like raw speed,
>> putting aside a critical and objetive assessment of its merits
>> compared against the alternatives.
>
> You underestimate git.  And you underestimate "people".  Torvalds
> usually does several hundreds of merges a day.

The typical Emacs developer is not like Torvads. Emacs has a development
style that is very far from Linux's. Every example about how well git
works specifically for Torvalds is moot.

> And that's not just because of "raw speed", but also because of
> high-quality merging strategies.

git's mergin strategies are possibly superior to bzr, but do we (Emacs
and most other Free projects) really need them? I think not.

> Moving Emacs towards Bazaar was a real stress test for
> Bazaar, and still is.

This will be fixed over time. git's problems (mostly UI and poor support
for non-POSIX environments) will not be solved anytime soon.

[snip]

-- 
Óscar