Re: What's cooking in git.git (Apr 2013, #05; Mon, 15)

[off-topic; what happened/happens to your series is entirely unrelated
to the issue]

Felipe Contreras wrote:

Nobody knows how life began, and it doesn't matter now, what matters
is how life evolves. It doesn't matter if the chicken was first, or
the egg, what matters is that if all the chickens and eggs are gone,
there won't be more.

Plenty of projects have died because they stopped caring about their
users, and without users there's no new developers, and the old
developers eventually move on, and all the literary quality of commit
messages have no eyes to see it.

I was a pure end-user of git until about Jan 2010.  I was initially
impressed with git because it behaved in a beautiful consistent
manner.  Then I dug in and found out that it had a beautiful codebase,
excellent mailing list (content and conventions), and large
development community.  I could literally read through the commit
messages and code with ease.  I do bounce between a few projects, but
always come back to git because nothing else fits the criterion.  What
I do not consider (as much as the other things) is the
number-of-end-users.

Then again, you would argue that I came across git only because of a
large enough user-base.  I agree with that, but you're practically
idolizing user-base as the most important thing.

My point is simple: yes, it's nice to have a big user base.  We
already do.  Now, what's the point of pitching to end-users who only
use the most basic functionality?  Their inputs are likely to be
useless (arising from misunderstandings) anyway.  They're not going to
be the next developers.  And they're not going to help create what our
next developer is looking for in us either (i.e. codebase, community).

Our primary customers are each other, because that's how we get a
tight community and great codebase.  And because the next potential
developer looks like one of us.

That does _not_ mean: live only within the community.  Everyone should
have a healthy interaction with the outside world, otherwise they risk
turning into researchers and suffering engineering myopia.  And
ofcourse not attract a large userbase.