Re: Apologia for bzr

[Tassilo Horn]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> They are impenetrable.  The very first words will get you in a "WTF?"
> mode.

All the terminology that's referred to in the git command man pages is
defined in one central place, the gitglossary(7) man page.  But in fact,
basically every git command man page should list that under SEE ALSO but
doesn't.

> Just try to read the first sentences of any random man page through a
> newbie's eyes.  No term is ever explained before used -- do these guys
> even understand what it means to _explain_ things?

With respect to newby friendliness: probably bzr is easier to grasp if
you haven't used a (d)VCS before, but in the presence of extremely
popular sites such as gitorious and github, most potential (Emacs)
contributors have gotten in touch with git anyway.  That's the case for
me, and I sometimes mess up my bzr checkout just because I naively
transfer my usual git habits and workflow to bzr.  Of course, I
shouldn't do that, but that's probably a trap many people coming from
git to bzr will fall in.

Another strong point of git is getting support.  When I started with it,
I sometimes messed up my checkouts just as I'm messing up things with
bzr nowadays.  But just by explaining what I've done on
address@hidden (right now there are ~1000 users in there so
there's almost certainly someone with very deep git knowledge) I was
able to recover within minutes.  With bzr, I usually ask here on
emacs-devel because the bzr support channel is quite unresponsive
nowadays, and then you, Eli, will give me the answers I'm looking for
(thanks again!).  But nevertheless, with git you can really get 24/7
handholding if you want to.

Bye,
Tassilo