Re: On the popularity of git

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/31/2015 06:50 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> I just want to be a user, as one can quite easily be a user of hg or
> bzr.

Nobody's asking you to be a Git developer here. I know I'm not asking, 
nor am I one.

> Being a user of git involves learning its internal structures.
> (Note the people recently emphasising the internal representation of a
> git branch to me, talking about pointers to its tip, and so on.  I
> really don't want to have to know about such stuff.)

To a reasonably proficient Git user, that sounds like "I don't want to 
know what graphs are", or a C programmer saying they don't want to 
bother knowing about memory layout (that's a thing, right?).

This stuff is easy enough to learn that claims "I don't want to" don't 
sound compelling at all.

> It is evident that when the UI for git was "designed" nobody of any
> experience (or taste) in UIs was involved in the process.  Nobody knew
> when to say "stop!".  So there are _lots_ of commands, and the ones used
> most often have 20, 30, 50 options to learn about, some of which do
> several distinctly different things (e.g. git checkout).

You don't learn all commands and all options. You first figure out what 
you want to do, and then learn how to do it. Much easier.

> But in both of them, the commit message template informed you which
> files were being committed, giving you the opportunity to abort.

Guess what. Git does the same thing.

Just not in the Emacs interface provided by VC.

> The
> vagueness and uncertainty introduced by git's two stage committing,

No such thing.