Re: base

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Óscar Fuentes writes:

 > It is perfectly possible to use git without knowing its model, in
 > the sense that you can store your changes on the repo, see logs,
 > etc. More or less like CVS or Subversion (or Bazaar!) where the
 > user knows recipes for dealing with a restricted, mostly
 > simplistic, set of requirements.

Not "the" user.  A certain set of users.  Namely, the set of users who
simply follow the recommended workflows and don't complain or suggest
changes to them.

 > On the long term (or not so long) it is not the most cost-effective
 > approach.

For the users described above, it probably is.  That's why Bazaar is
reasonably popular among people who are project managers in
companies.  They choose one of the well-supported workflows (many of
which are rather centralized, which often suits managers), the users
learn it easily because Bazaar makes it easy, and life is good.
Nothing wrong with that.

For projects like Emacs, however, it is messy (and possibly
disastrous) if the people who are "making the rules" don't have a good
model.  Not only does each one have to have a model, but they had
better share almost all of it.  That's not just the folks like Stefan
and Richard who have big votes, but also folks like you, me, and Eli.

It's not the least common denominator users who are the reason that a
DVCS should provide a good model.  It's for the use of the policy
makers (and, as you argue convincingly, the power users).

 > Do you want to see a file on another branch without switching to
 > it? Want to temporarily reset your working copy to some point on
 > the past?

But many users will *never* want to do either of those.  They want to
clone the trunk or the stable branch (often not both!), and after that
they need log, status, diff, commit, update/pull, and push.  (And
maybe not even commit, let alone push.)