Re: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
To: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Cc: "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>,
	"Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>,
	"Duy Nguyen" <pclouds@gmail.com>,
	"Stefan Beller" <sbeller@google.com>,
	"Git Mailing List" <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	git-packagers@googlegroups.com,
	"Han-Wen Nienhuys" <hanwen@google.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2018 14:59:39 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20180806185938.GB18119@sigill.intra.peff.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20180806171119.GC120433@aiede.svl.corp.google.com>

On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 10:11:19AM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> > We're developers ourselves, and we interact with new developers that we
> > want to help.  But there are masses of people[1] building Git who are
> > _not_ developers, and want the default to be as robust as possible.
> > They're probably not going to show up in this thread.
> >
> > -Peff
> >
> > [1] I actually wonder how large that mass is. Clearly there are many
> >     orders of magnitude more users than there are developers. But I have
> >     no idea what percentage of them build from source versus using
> >     somebody else's binary package.
> 
> Relatedly, we need to think about the incentives these defaults
> create.  Personally, I want *more* naive users to be building from
> source, because then they are better able to test recent versions,
> bisect, test my patches, etc.
> 
> As I hinted in my earlier reply, I think it would be best to try some
> basic things to make DEVELOPER more visible first.  If that fails,
> then we can revisit how to make this more drastic change in a way that
> minimizes the harm (and I am not sure yet that that is possible).

Yes, I agree very much with both of those paragraphs.

-Peff