Re: base

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > Thanks.  However, what you wrote just shows once again that we are
 > talking on two very different levels.  Your "user" is actually a
 > hacker who wants to know and understand a lot about low-level
 > details of the tool's operation.

No.  I'm saying that the project needs a few users who understand at
that level, and that therefore it is important to have such a model.
See my response to Óscar for details.  Óscar's point about the
simplicity of the git model is also relevant.

I apologize for not making it clear that I do understand that average
users can do fine without deep understanding (but with competent
guidance).  My main point is that somebody like you who has intervened
in the process of recommending workflows really should have a good
model.

 > quite efficiently (no thanks to bzr docs), without having a
 > slightest idea how it represents the history DAG or what are all
 > those files in the .bzr subdirectories of my repository.

Er, Eli, I didn't mention any of those files (or their analogs in
git), and I don't recall the docs I pointed to describing them,
although it did mention their existence.

 > Contrary to what you say, these are, IMO, private data, not public
 > data; for example, if bzr changes its repository format, I as a
 > user don't care as long as there's a simple way of upgrading to the
 > new format.

But the point is that often there isn't a simple way.  In fact, on one
of my platforms I'm currently stuck without a usable bzr because
Ubuntu Jaunty provides bzr 1.13, and that doesn't do format 2a, which
is required for Launchpad.  Upgrading Ubuntu is not an easy option for
me, either.