Re: git annoyances

["Govind Salinas" <govind@sophiasuchtig.com>]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 6:56 PM, André Goddard Rosa
<andre.goddard@gmail.com> wrote:
> >  > but it was a PITA and all of git's messages about the problem were not
>  >  > only unhelpful, they confused me into looking for problems where there
>  >  > were none IMO.
>  >
>  >  Yes, we need to teach "git" to do more mind-reading (I am not being
>  >  sarcastic).  There should be a pattern in common user errors that share
>  >  their roots to the same user misperception, and if we can identify that,
>  >  maybe we can make git guess what the user was really trying to do and give
>  >  better error messages than it currently does.
>
>  Something along the lines of:
>
>  Error description
>  Why it happened
>  How to solve/Sugestion
>

Hi,

This actually touches on one of my main purposes  behind Pyrite.  I intend to
do the following things to help the situation and I was wondering what the
git community's reaction is.

1) Since it will be designed for end users I intend to remove the options not
designed for end users.  This will also shorten up the help so that the entire
help can be shown to the user when they encounter an error.

2) No unnamed options.  I think this would have helped the above case
although it would have required a *bit* more typing.  The command would
have looked like "pyt pull/fetch -r x86 -b latest"  Combined with the above
the command would have spit out the help and a message stating what was
missing.

3) No syntax.  Git has a lot of syntax.  It has refspecs, revision ranges,
symbolic names (although i do like these) that a user has to learn.  I
think this
is one of the most error prone parts of the git for new users.
Hopefully, I will
be able to find simple and straightforward ways for the user to supply
this info.

Any comments/suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Govind.