Re: obnoxious CLI complaints

[John Tapsell <johnflux@gmail.com>]

2009/9/13 Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>:
> On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 09:32:09PM +0300, John Tapsell wrote:
>> 2009/9/12 Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>:
>> > On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 05:09:31PM -0700, Brendan Miller wrote:
>> >> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> > Brendan Miller <catphive@catphive.net> writes:
>> >> >>
>> >> Is the goal of interface design to make
>> >> it difficult so I need to learn a lot of things, or easy so I can
>> >> remain blissfully ignorant but still do what I want?
>> >
>> > Neither. You cannot get what unless you have specified what you want,
>> > and for that you have to learn how to say that. Having good defaults is
>> > very important, but the problem with choosing them is that people have
>> > different preferences about them. For instance, you wanted the default
>> > prefix for git-archive to be $myproject. For me, a good default would be
>> > either $tag_name, or $myproject-$tag_name, or empty (as it is now!). So,
>> > what you propose is *never* a good default for me. Moreover, changing
>> > any default will cause a lot of pain for other people who use Git now.
>> > Besides, writing something like --prefix='' is very ugly. So, the
>> > current default makes perfect sense.
>>
>> Ah, great logic.  You can't find a default that will suit everyone,
>> therefore don't bother.
>
> I did not say "don't bother". On contrary, I said that defaults are very
> important, but, in this case, the current default makes far more sense
> that what was proposed by Brendan.
>
>>
>> >> Yeah, I've been reading them. I'm saying that the docs are a crutch.
>> >> RTFM is the problem not the solution. It makes the user do more work
>> >> to avoid fixing usability issues.
>> >
>> > A usability issue exists when a person knows how to do that, but it is
>> > inconvenient or error-prone; or when a learning curve is too steep.
>> > But when someone cannot use, let's say, a compiler, because he or she
>> > refuses to read to learn the language, it is not a usability issue.
>>
>> It's a usability issue when it doesn't just do the right thing in the
>> majority of cases and lets you specify what you want it to do in the
>> rest of the cases.
>
> It does the right thing for me, and not just in most cases, it does so
> in _all_ cases, because it does exactly it is told to do. And it is a
> very important characteristics for any VCS, otherwise you can mess up
> things easily. What is also good about Git is that it does not require
> much keystrokes to do even rather complex stuff. And many defaults and
> commands are configurable, so you can adjust it to your workflow. So,
> I am not sure what your problem is.

Because I wouldn't call this just a few keystrokes to do the common case:

    git archive --format=tar --prefix=HEAD/ HEAD | gzip > head.tar.gz

I honestly don't understand the backlash against Brenden's point that
this could be made a bit simpler.

John