Re: Cleaning up git user-interface warts

Shawn Pearce wrote:

Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

As for the fraction of people complaining being a small fraction of 
current GIT users: that is easily explainable by the fact that most 
people who would have grown the complainers group are simply not GIT 
users anymore since they were turned away by GIT's current user 
interface issues.  The only complainers remaining are those who see 
value in the GIT technology but who would like to bring more 
intuitiveness to the GIT interface instead of going for the alternative 
technology.  And those kind of people are always few.

Or they are by proxy.

*I* don't see that much of a problem with git pull; I can use it
without trouble at this point.  But I find it difficult to teach
to others.

My complaints about git pull/fetch/push are by proxy for about 10
other users who aren't on the mailing list but whom I interact with
through Git.  They don't like pull/fetch/push very much.

So count my complaints 10 times.  :)

Ok, that's still a drop in the bucket of current Git users.
But still, I'm sure there are others.  I think Carl was recently
talking about complaints from some Fedora folks...

Agreed. Personally, the first thing that I notice when trying to switch
 from Subversion to git is the behavior of 'index', mainly in git-diff, git-status and 
git-commit.

For people switching from CVS and SVN it would be much better if the index was hidden 
behind the scenes by using different defaults:

git-commit -a
git-status -a
git-diff HEAD

BTW, currently there's a minor bug: git-diff HEAD doesn't work before you 
make the first commit. Perhaps this should be special cased.

I could personally get used to this, but I'd surely get blank 
stares from people when teaching them the difference.

I guess this is the reason that the GIT Tutorial for CVS/SVN users is talking about _cogito_ instead.
(which is very confusing for someone coming to _git_ home page, trying to learn git).