Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 4e23cd0 4/5: * mail/rmail.el (rmail-show-message-1): When displaying a mime message,

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 04/07/2015 07:13 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Why should I have a "motivation to learn" so much about using git?
> I am not learning it our of curiosity!

I specifically meant to learn how to examine the results (which isn't 
much), but you can even do that using vc-print-root-log. Looking back, 
that alone wouldn't have helped.

Guess this time the key issue was you didn't know what to write in a 
merge commit message, but reading up on what a merge is in Git, on your 
own, might have cleared that up too.

> You make an analogy of fishing.  Suppose you are a teacher, and
> a government imposes the rule that every teacher must catch a fish
> each day in order to be allowed to teach that day.  Do you want
> to learn to fish, or do you want the rule cancelled?

If there's a shortage of food in town, and the regular fishermen can 
only catch enough to feed their families, I suppose everyone might have 
to go fishing, in addition to their regular employment.

But if you recall, leaving the fishing to the fishermen and just go 
teaching was also on the table (send patches through the mailing list). 
Though maybe I'm twisting the metaphor a bit here.

> Development tools are supposed to make our work easier -- not harder.
> For me, Git means many hurdles to jump in order to do the things that
> were easy before.

I'm sure most of it is unfamiliarity, and not the genuinely difficult 
interface, as some people like to claim.

But while working on Emacs, I also have had to spend effort on things 
that I usually find of little use: ChangeLog files, NEWS, updating the 
manual (one or two occasions), certain cases of maintaining backward 
compatibility. Yet other people apparently benefited from it, as so did 
the project as a whole.

> Also, I do this infrequently enough that I will have time to forget
> whatever I learn now.

That's a concern. But while specific commands might be forgettable, the 
core model of how Git represents history is fairly easy to get your head 
around and remember. If you read up on it, next time you're dealing with 
Git, even the man pages should make more sense, and using web search 
should be easier for more general questions.