Re: Making git as easy as CVS, for handling merge conflicts

[Adam Spiers]

On Fri, Nov 01, 2019 at 03:01:16PM +0300, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> Adam Spiers <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 Oct 2019 at 00:12, Taylan Kammer <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > On 28.10.2019 00:51, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > > I don't know how CVS handles merge conflicts, but the Emacs extension Magit is 
> > > a very nice front-end to Git
> >
> > I strongly recommend any emacs user who switches to git to try it as the 
> > learning curve is very gentle and the gains in efficiency are huge.
>
> On the other hand, one may strongly recommend anyone who switches to git _not_ 
> to try it, as there no reason to complicate the process by switching both 
> backend and frontend at once, when he has Emacs, which transparently provides a 
> uniform interface to all VCSes.

There *are* reasons, including the gains in efficiency I mentioned.  It's a 
tradeoff between complexity and efficiency.  Each person should be empowered to 
judge what is best for them personally, based on factors like how important it 
is to them individually to have a single interface for all VCSes, vs. having 
arguably the most powerful git frontend out there.  Therefore IMHO it is more 
helpful in these discussions to offer alternatives to consider rather than to 
recommend ignoring alternatives.

Maybe if rms is too busy to spend a little bit of effort learning a new 
interface, and still regularly needs to operate with CVS etc., then VC might be 
the right choice for him.  But an informed decision would include consideration 
of reasonable alternatives like magit.

git uses fundamentally different paradigm to the model on which VC was 
designed.  One of many examples of this is that it requires staging changes 
before committing them.  My personal opinion is that it makes no sense to use a 
version control frontend which is totally outdated relative to the backend in 
question.  I enjoyed using VC for many years (and hacked various extensions to 
it), but it hasn't kept pace with the evolution of modern VCS frontends.  I 
estimate that its functionality is probably about 5% of what magit offers.