Re: svn versus git

Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] wrote:

Andy Parkins wrote:

quoted

On Wednesday 2006 December 13 22:56, Shawn Pearce wrote:

quoted

  git cat-file -p $REV:$file

not sure how much easier it gets than that.  Load in the bash
completion from contrib/completion and you can even tab complete
the $file part.

Yes.  I was a little unfair on that one; I forgot about the REV:file syntax.  
However, it's still not simple for a new user; I think I'd say "draw" if 
the "-p" weren't a requirement.

  $ git repo-config alias.less "-p cat-file -p"
  $ git repo-config alias.cat     "cat-file -p"

remedies that.

[...]

quoted

quoted

How is it unfriendly?  What specifically would you change to make
it more friendly?

$ git-ls-tree v1.0.0
100644 blob 906e98492080d2fde9467a9970fc92d7a8cfeaf8    Makefile

quoted

I'm a newbie: what's that number at the front?  What's a blob?  What's
that great big number - I've only seen commit hashes that look like
that, and that isn't one.  Definitely not friendly.

The number in front is octal mode of a file or directory. "blob"
is a file (or symbolic link), "tree" is a directory, all of this
can be found in git(7).

I don't want to come through as rude, but that you can find the explanation
somewhere (and as an old(ish) Unix/git hand you know (or should be able to
guess easily) what it means) doesn't help the _newbie_ confronted with this
gibberish one iota. Explaining it it the git list also doesn't help. Either
make it self-explanatory, relegate this command to git-plumbing or axe its
output (perhaps show this only with --verbose or such, with Unix you get
fast to the point where you know --verbose is probably totally mistifying
except for /real/ experts :-).

[...]

Perhaps we should add git-ls which would be porcelain frontend
to git-ls-files and git-ls-tree, just like git-diff is frontend
to git-diff-files, git-diff-index and git-diff-tree (and also does
pure blob diff).

That is a more newbie-friendly answer.
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