Re: On the popularity of git

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Steinar.

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 10:08:13PM +0100, Steinar Bang wrote:
> >>>>> Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>:

> > Not at all.  There are 20, 30, or 50 options which all consciously
> > have to be omitted.  Otherwise you are stumbling in the dark, or
> > merely learning sequences of commands by rote (as I have done), rather
> > than truly mastering them.

> Could you concretely name some of these 20 to 50 options?

Yes, I could, but it would be far less work for anybody interested
simply to look at a typical git man page.  For example, git-commit has
38 options, and that's not counting long and short forms of the same
option as being different.  (For comparison, hg commit has 12 options,
whose descriptions are so succinct (between three and eleven words
each), that they can be scanned in a matter of a few seconds.)

> If you have to omit them all the time, it shouldn't be too much work.

The work involved is in checking through all these options to discover
which ones aren't needed.  Given that the man pages aren't well written, 
this can be a long, tedious process.  I suspect most people just ignore
most of the options, cross their fingers, and hope.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).