Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> Never ever underestimate pet peeves. If we give many people an obvious 
> reason (however trivial and bike-shed-coloured) to complain, they will 
> complain.

I do actually think that this discussion has been informative, partly 
because I never even realized that some people would ever think to do 
"init-db" + "pull". 

Making things like that work is easy enough, it's just that I never saw 
any point until people complained. And when they complained, the initial 
complaint wasn't actually obvious. Only when Han-Wen actually gave 
something that didn't work, was it clear that the real issue wasn't so 
much _naming_, as just expectations about the _work_flow_.

> And hopefully you also agree that enhancing the syntax of git-merge to 
> grok "git-merge [-m message] <branch>" and "git-merge [-m message] 
> <url-or-remote> <branch>" would be a lovely thing, luring even more 
> people into using git.

I definitely think we can make "git merge" have a more pleasant syntax. 
I'm just still not sure that people should actually use it ;)

My real point was/is that usually it's really not the "naming details" 
that people _really_ have problems with. The real problems tend to be in 
learning a new workflow.

We can make some of those workflows easier, but I would heartily recommend 
that people not worry about naming of "pull" vs "fetch", because that's 
almost certainly not really the issue. Instead, if you have a problem, 
rather than concentrating on the names of the programs, say:

 - what do you want to get done.

   Most likely it's _trivial_ to do with git, it's just that somebody used 
   the wrong approach, and then it didn't work at all.

 - give actual examples of a workflow that didn't work or was complex.

   (again, the "init-db" + "pull" example). 

   And yes, in many cases, it might well be a case of "sure, we can make 
   that _other_ workflow work too". But somebody like me, who has used git 
   for a year and a half, and used BK before it, probably simply uses a 
   different workflow than somebody who comes from CVS. 

For example, I suspect that your gripe with "git fetch" was just from 
using it in a really awkward manner. Maybe we could make your workflow 
work with git too, but maybe it really already (and always) did, you just 
used a particular tool in a way that made the use be really really 
painful.

Sometimes it's just a question of "ok, use it like _this_, and now it's 
actually really simple". Other times it's "ok, I didn't even realize that 
you wanted to use it like _that_, and yeah, that's incredibly 
inconvenient, and we can change it".

I just got involved in this discussion because I thought people were 
talking about all the wrong things. Command naming really can't be _that_ 
big of a deal. I really don't believe that we should have some people use 
"gh" instead of "git" just because they think "pull" should mean not to 
merge or something.