Re: [PATCH] gitignore: warn about pointless syntax

On Tuesday 2012-01-10 08:01, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

quoted

You can either adjust the people, i.e. teach that their "false" assumption
is wrong and the feature they expect is available but not in a way that
they expect. Or you can adjust the tool to match their expectation.
[...]in real life, people are harder to train than tools[...]

Though, having one more way to do things leads to a certain mess at a 
later point, if such mess is not already present. I am thinking here of 
the precedent iptables option parser set by removing support for 
exclamation marks in odd positions, as it was redundant ("more than 1 
way"), was only supported by ~45% of all options and had to be 
explicitly invoked at every callsite - so in fact was harder on users 
than git would be for **. There were a few mails by people who could not 
seem to read error messages, but overall, within 6-9 months, everything 
was quiet again. So, that's the empiric result of what teaching-the-tool 
would do.

~ teaching-the-user would entail - it's factually problemfree.