Re: VC mode and git

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > What people are trying to tell you is that you are trying to force-fit
  > a DVCS into behaving like a centralized VCS because your thinking
  > about how to use it is still limited by old mental habits from RCS/CVS
  > days.

When a change in software makes people change their mental habits,
that is called "incompatibility".  It is a negative.

You can't make incompatibility a virtue by calling the previous mental
habits "old" or saying that they "limit" people.  That's just
name-calling.

           Early in my learning process about DVCSes I had the same
  > problem and had to get past it. Now it's your turn.

In other words, "We all suffered through this inconvenience, so why
shouldn't you have to suffer as we did?"

Perhaps you gained something in exchange for the incompatibility.
Distributed version control systems permit many things that may be
useful for you -- but I don't have an occasion to do those things.

Of course, it is not a lot of work to type 'git push'.  The issue is
not about that small amount of work.  The problem is the pitfall:
forgetting to do this leads to silent lossage.

Sometimes incompatibility is inevitable, but that's not true in this
case.  It is easy to see how to make VC make this operation
compatible, in various ways.  We can get all the benefit without the
pitfall.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.