Re: [kernel.org users] [RFD] On deprecating "git-foo" for builtins

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:59:58 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:

On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 11:34 -0400, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:

quoted

It's pretty normal to see opponents of a decision like this complain
loudly when it lands on their system, whereas the silent majority in
favour will be happy to see the change finally implemented but reluctant
to stir up the discussion again.

I don't think new arguments are brought to the discussion, just new
people, who are temporarily inconvened by a change towards sanity.

Nice emotive response, especially the subtle but unsubstantiated 'silent
majority in favour' bit -- but you forgot the part where you were
supposed to actually point out a tangible benefit which is achieved by
breaking compatibility like this.

And no, reducing the size of /usr/bin by a tiny fraction isn't really a
worthwhile benefit -- in reality, the 'silent majority' really couldn't
give a monkey's left testicle about that, and breakage caused by the
gratuitous change _far_ outweighs any minuscule improvement.

Reducing /usr/bin in size was totally worthwhile. Maybe not to you, but
to the silent majority I am a proud member of, it was. (I'm not saying
that the path that was taken to get there was optimal, just that the
goal was sound.)

I just can't think of any other tool which installs over 100 binaries
(or scripts, that's the same) in /usr/bin. Can you? This is simply
insane. If all tools did what git did, you'd have maybe 100,000 files
in /usr/bin (that is, if your filesystem supports that) and your system
would be pretty slow. So I'm very glad to see git come back to reason.
If nothing else, just so that other tool authors don't think it's the
right way to do it.

It's particularly silly because we could have just made these aliases
optional but present by default, so those few nutters who _really_ spend
their days worrying about such stuff can do without them.

-- 
Jean Delvare