TechNom (nobody)
Epilogue: She got what she asked for and completed the work 5 years ago.
Git is a hack that was created by a bunch of kernel hackers with a UI that wasn’t originally meant to be the final user-facing UI. If you have done what the kernel devs do, you would understand git. That includes:
- Taking snapshots of the source tree (perhaps as a zip or tar), along with a file that indicates what snapshot was for, you understand trees.
- Applying patch queues (with something like quilt), you understand commits, rebasing and cherrypicks.
- Reversing a patch - you get reverts.
- Modifying a patch - you get commit amends.
- Do a 3 way merge - that’s a git merge.
There were a whole bunch of ad-hoc kernel dev operations that got consolidated in git. Honestly, a similar tool should rethink the design to be more intuitive, orthogonal and have fewer concepts that cover all use-cases. (No. xkcd doesn’t apply here. Git does everything. It just needs a better design).
I use git almost every hour and I rarely have to deal with git problems (just enough practice to avoid them). I’m also confident about resolving problems if they do arise. Heck, I even configure my entire system and manage my life using text files managed by git. So I don’t claim that it’s all that bad.
But if you want me to give concrete examples of how problematic git UI can be, you are so far removed from reality and are neglecting the very visible and vocal struggle git beginners have. I’m saying this as someone who trained a lot of people in using git from the very beginner level, all the way up to emailing patches - as part of a community and as a corporate trainer. I can write essays about every single problem that can trip a beginner due to git’s inconsistency - but am not going to - because they are acknowledged problems (by git devs) and they actively work on it.
Sorry. I am not willing to waste my time typing out examples for someone who is too stubborn and lazy to just Google it - It’s a topic that has been discussed a billion times. If you want to paint me as incapable for that, go ahead - your opinion is worth as much as your willingness to just search for an answer yourself.
While I don’t want to deny the problems of not having namespaces, they will introduce a new set of problems. One issue with Github and similar platforms with namespaces is that a search for a repo turns up multiple projects with the same name under different namespaces. It’s always a confusion as to which one is canonical. Another problem is that people are now going to name squat namespaces instead of project names. Imagine somebody registers the serde namespace. Their crates may be mistaken as the canonical one.
If any FOSS project maintainers see this, please stop using Discord for your community.
Matrix is one option, if you just want a chatroom, similar to IRC. An online forum, like Discourse (not discord) is even better, since it creates a searchable history of past discussions. That way, most users who face any issue with your software can solve it themselves based on past discussions.