Re: Undo last commit?

Please do not top-post, and do not remove git mailing list from Cc.
Sorry for double posting; forgot to re-add git@vger.kernel.org

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012, Mike ??? wrote:

2012/2/11 Neal Kreitzinger [off-list ref]

quoted

On 6/28/2011 8:57 AM, Holger Hellmuth wrote:

quoted

It would be a nice companion to the not-yet-realized "git unadd" ;-)

or perhaps "git unstage"...

If lot's of people have the same problem then it IS a design flaw. If
something is designed well and genuinely intuitive then they just work.
Think iPhone, iPod, some DVD players and other well designed user
interfaces. The same goes for command line tools... the options should have
names that don't have any ambiguity.

Many of problems with git user interface have their source from the fact
that git, including its interface, was evolved rather than created using
big-design-upfront workflow.  And it _had_ to be evolved, as there was not
much of prior art (well, not good prior art) in the area of DVCS.

Besides, as they say:

  The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.

                                                             -- Bruce Ediger

Techie guys almost always blame the users, this is a very bad attitude. For
example I've met so many techies that THINK they can design websites...
err... they can't. They CAN program sure, but they CAN'T design the user
experience properly as that is not their expertise. Just as we wouldn't
expect a graphic designer or user interface specialist to do the coding.

There is also problem in that you need to know git well to _code_ interface;
and when you know git well you don't notice no longer the problems that you
had as a newbie.

On the other hand new git users sometimes have problems distinguishing
between accidental complexity of bad UI design, and essential complexity
of a powerfull and flexible tool.

[...]

So, Mike, will you bitch or will you try to help?

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

So, Mike, will you bitch or will you try to help?

I sent a message (not to the git list by accident, sorry) that made
the same mistake, but I think I was misdiagnosing.

I suspect Mike wanted to invite us to take a closer look at the story
in [1] and learn what can be learned from it.  (For example, may be an
error message or some documentation needs to be improved, or maybe new
enhancements like "git checkout -B master HEAD^" would have helped.)

Unfortunately the message [1] is not very focused, making it hard to
learn from.  So my advice to Mike would be to try again, and to
clearly explain what problem he was trying to solve and when git
failed him (either by a command producing a different effect than
expected or the appropriate command to carry out some action being
hard to find).

Jonathan

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/175968