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[187.189.187.231]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id l10sm2043005oti.9.2021.07.04.10.23.17 (version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256/256); Sun, 04 Jul 2021 10:23:17 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sun, 04 Jul 2021 12:23:06 -0500 From: Felipe Contreras To: Theodore Ts'o , Felipe Contreras Cc: Atharva Raykar , Git List Message-ID: <60e1ee7a3cfbc_6d11d20811@natae.notmuch> In-Reply-To: References: <60df97ed24687_34a92088a@natae.notmuch> <60e0a9707e09a_2f7208f2@natae.notmuch> Subject: Re: The git spring cleanup challenge completion Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 01:16:16PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: > > Atharva Raykar wrote: > > > I can imagine aliases like 'co' only adding to the overload of > > > information if an instructor is not careful. FWIW, I have never seen a new > > > user complain about the length of the typing, it's usually with the plethora > > > of unintelligible (to them) options that each command has when they open the > > > Git man pages, which adds more fear. > > > > This is one of the reasons I suggested to split git into two binaries: > > git for normal users, and git-tool for all the plumbing not many humans > > use. > > It might be that the answer for the problem Atharva has described > would be for someone so include to create a new front-end to git --- > call it "sg", for simplified git", or "gt" for git tool (different > from the "git-tool suggested by Felipe), etc. > > It could be an extremely opinionated subset of git's functionality; > for example, it could be one where the index is completely hidden from > the user, so you never need to type "sg add" when modifying a file, > but only when adding a new file to be under source code management > (e.g., that "sg commit" would effectively imply "git add -u ; git > commit"), and so on. Since the index doesn't conceptually exist in > the sg interface, then "sg reset" would only have the meaning of "git > reset --hard", etc. > > By definition this simplified front-end to git would have a subset of > the functionality of "full git", but that's OK. The whole goal would > be to make something super newbie-friendly --- the equivalent of a > "Mac OS-like" interface, that perhaps doesn't have the power of > someone who opens up a shell and uses tools like awk or perl, but is > good enough "for the rest of the human race". > > Note that this doesn't have to be an official "git" ccommunity > initiative; anyone could try to create such one of these things (and I > believe a few things exist already). > > Making it a non-goal that this "user friendly" front end doesn't have > to have the full functionality of git, and its main goal is to allow > the use of different user interface design choices made by git, might > be much simpler than trying to change git, which would require having > the argument over which functionality is used by "normal users", and > which features should be exiled to "git-pull" as being "fringe" > features. I think there's some value in that idea but that doesn't solve the same problem my suggestion solves. Basically there's too many commands in `man git`. Splitting the git binary would allow us to only put the important commands in `man git`. I think having too many commands overwhelms many newcomers, because they don't know which it's important for them to learn and which are basically noise. -- Felipe Contreras