Re: Obscure error/warning/information message from git pull

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> You are in fact saying that it is impossible for a Git newbie to grasp
> the basic concepts and do any useful work without a detailed
> understanding of the internals.  I don't think it's true.

Git has been designed and built from the internals up.  A number of
commands in daily use are what the Git authors call "plumbing".  There
are some mostly end-user oriented programs characterized as "porcelaine"
but they don't form a complete and coherent set.

The initial understanding was that actual version control applications
for "end users" would be designed with Git as an engine.  There have
been a few experiments for creating different workflows on top of Git
like "quilt" and "stgit" but while they have a bit of a user base, none
of those is actually used to any significant degree when compared to
just Git.

It's not that different from Emacs itself where a lot of defaults and
options and commands are "user-friendly" but, in contrast to other
"user-friendly" editors, when trying to solve real-world tasks on your
own you are likely going to run into complexity and Elisp leaking in
your face.  So it's not all that rare when demonstrating the user
friendliness of Emacs, there are the occasional 10 seconds where you
have to ask your audience to look away for a moment.

Git workflows with the default commands are rather close to the
"plumbing" and need to refer to it at times.  As a result, it's fairly
easy to run into "look away for a minute" territory.  So "I don't want
to learn about internals" may be even less successful in the long run
than "I don't want to learn about Elisp" is with Emacs, and there is
less of a tradition with Git over Emacs of having others around who have
built turnkey applications for your workflows.

-- 
David Kastrup