Re: In support of Jonas Bernoulli's Magit

[raman]

John Yates <address@hidden> writes:

1+-- well said and well explained!> On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 1:42 PM, raman 
<address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> There are many things that Git lets you do that are at the power-user
>> end of the spectrum --- an
> d magit actually makes those doable, whereas
>> the git commandline would never encourage  you to venture even close.
>
> I mentioned earlier in this thread that because Magit is so compelling I
> use it to induce susceptible colleagues to try emacs. Let me elaborate.
>
> I work at a company that is trying to up its software engineering
> practices.  An important part of that effort is mandating code reviews.
> That alone though does not result in particularly useful reviews or
> feedback.  The main obstacle is that developers work until a task is
> complete and then submit all of their changes as a single, overwhelming
> review request.
>
> There are developers within the company who are familiar with patch
> series culture as exemplified by the Gnu/Linux kernel.  Others, though
> having no first hand experience, understand the ideas and acknowledge
> that offering code for review as a well groomed patch series would be
> a big improvement.  The problem is that in the real world code never
> gets designed / authored / debugged such that it emerges naturally as
> an intelligible, coherent patch series.  It takes real work to extract
> such a series.  And of course most developers have absolutely no idea
> idea how they would go about turning a workspace or even a chaotic
> series of incremental commits into such a series.
>
> That is where Magit shines.  It allows one to move arbitrary chunks
> of code forward and back among a sequence of commits.  As such it
> gives a developer a concrete visualization of the emerging commits
> and their contents.  Nor is one restricted to moving hunks identified
> by a diff tool.  In Magit a chunk can just as easily be an arbitrary
> marked region.
>
> When I demo Magit for my colleagues they immediately get excited.
> It makes it clear that fostering a patch series culture need not be
> a pipe dream.
>
> To date I am unaware of any other tool on any platform offering
> similar functionality.
>
> Were an emacs user to ask me to suggest a package (s)he should use
> to interact with git I would always plug Magit.  Not that I would
> discourage learning VC.  Clearly (as Raman has explained) VC has a
> role.  Magit though alters how one thinks about presenting one's
> coding efforts to the greater world.
>
> /john?6?6
>

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