Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

quoted

quoted

None that any normal user would want to use.

Linus, do you really think that the editor _you_ use is used by more
people than Emacs?  Think again.

No.

But I'm also not confused enough to think that people should use 
micro-emacs for reading man-pages.

Could you refrain from using name-calling on everybody that does not
share your preferences?  It is annoying to hear you talk all the time
about "normal", "sane", "confused" and so on.

The UNIX philosophy is "do one thing, and do it well".

And Emacs does text, and does it well.  It is just that very much
information can ultimately be viewed as text.  For example, I can run
grep or locate inside of Emacs.  Nothing exciting.  And then I can
click on the lines those put out, and get moved to the corresponding
line in the source code, in my editor.  Again, nothing exciting, but
it does not work with disconnected tools without the glue Emacs
provides.  There are other IDEs providing that sort of thing, but
usually they work just with output they produced themselves.

Using Emacs to read man-pages means that I can grab manpage content
easily with my accustomed editing commands and paste them into a mail
I am composing.  Without having to use a mouse or GUI.

It enables workflows that are not possible outside of it.  It is ok if
you don't find the tradeoff appealing, but that does not make you
"normal" and other people "confused" and "insane".

So please get a grip and focus on what we were actually talking
about.  Not Emacs, but rather documentation formats.

Man-pages with man.

Actually, Emacs "woman" does a pretty good job with those, offers
convenient man page name completion and works on Windows and similar
platforms without needing

html with a web browser. And edit stuff with an editor.

Why the *hell* do you confuse my choice of editor with my choice of
man-page format? I didn't.

Why the hell do you keep changing the topic and go off on sideline
rants.

That whole "do everything in emacs" is a disease. And then emacs
users think that it's "sane".

Focus.  How do you propose to manage documention of a hundred pages an
more conveniently, finding information easily by text, index,
hyperlinks?  A single large HTML page?  A documentation directory full
of *.txt files which you can grep through (not that Emacs would not be
useful for that, too)?

How do you find all information pertaining to "remote tracking
branches" in the git documentation?  Explain your workflow with that,
and explain why a sane person would prefer that over typing
info git
i remote TAB RET , , ,
and being taken to the respective text locations in turn.

Standalone info _is_ a single application doing a single job:
navigating large hyperlinked plain text documentation efficiently.  It
may be an _ugly_ application, but instead of saying what you use
instead in your daily workflow, you revert to name-calling.

If you have a _working_ solution to offer for that task, try
presenting it instead of calling people using other tools names.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

So please get a grip and focus on what we were actually talking
about.  Not Emacs, but rather documentation formats.

You're the one who started talking about me expecting people to use *my* 
editor. I had never done that. I had talked about the _reverse_: the 
idiocy of emacs users expecting people to use that bloated piece of 
crap-ware.

quoted

Man-pages with man.

Actually, Emacs "woman" does a pretty good job with those, offers
convenient man page name completion and works on Windows and similar
platforms without needing

See? Can you not see that normal users don't want to have some random 
emacs crap? In fact, even GNU emacs users (apart from the ones that have 
used it for more than a decade) don't do it.

So stop this *insane* insistence of emacs. You should learn to just assume 
that people don't even have it installed!

Anything that works with some random emacs mode is a total non-usable 
piece of crap as far as most users are concerned.

Focus.  How do you propose to manage documention of a hundred pages an
more conveniently, finding information easily by text, index,
hyperlinks?  A single large HTML page?  A documentation directory full
of *.txt files which you can grep through (not that Emacs would not be
useful for that, too)?

Oh, a single large html page is certainly better than emacs and info, 
absolutely. Ask *any* normal person.

The fact that you cannot see that fact is a sign of your personal (and 
rather odd) preferences.

			Linus