Re: Working with public-inbox.org [Was: [PATCH] rev-parse: respect core.hooksPath in --git-path]

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Eric,

On Thu, 18 Aug 2016, Eric Wong wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> > Old dogs claim the mail list-approach works for them. Nope. Doesn't.
> > Else you would not have written all those custom scripts.
> 
> git and cogito started as a bunch of custom scripts, too.

The difference is that neither git nor cogito were opinionated. Those
custom scripts are. They are for one particular workflow, with one
particular mail client, with a strong bias to a Unix-y environment.

I work really hard to make Git for Windows as easy and fun to use as
possible. I just wish that we were working together to make it as easy and
fun to contribute to Git, too.

> I see a choice of mail client as no different than a choice of
> text editor.  Neither my mail client or text editor is heavily
> customized.  The key feature I rely on from both tools is piping
> data to external commands.

There you go. That key feature seems to be unavailable in the most
wide-spread email client: Outlook. So by not restricting the choice you
should make it possible to use that mail client, too, right?

We do not even have a section on Outlook in our SubmittingPatches.

Okay, if not the most popular mail client, then web mail? Nope, nope,
nope. No piping *at all* to external commands from there.

So you basically slam the door shut on the vast majority of email users.

That is not leaving much choice to the users in my book.

> OTOH, today, I see people using git aliases all the time which
> look more like ASM instructions than user commands.

I see this as a completely different beast. Aliases help users accelerate
their personal workflow. Whereas anybody who is already willing to
contribute to Git *must* go through that non-personal workflow we impose:
paste the diff in a very specific format into the mail, and don't you dare
use a mail client that mangles whitespace (which is, like, pretty much
every single popular mail client out there).

So *allowing* users to configure their own aliases, and *forcing* them to
figure out how to transport patches through a medium hostile to patches,
is pretty much two diametrically opposed things.

> Users ought to be able to pick, choose, and replace tools as
> they wish as long as an interchange format remains stable
> and widely-supported.

Right. Let's talk about the interchange format called mails, for the data
called patches. Is it stable and widely-supported?

Can users really pick and choose the tools they like most to send patches
to the Git project? Like, the Outlook client? Or the GMail client?

> Even today, at least one Linux kernel hacker still uses quilt to
> generate patches: http://ozlabs.org/~akpm/mmotm/

Andrew does not count, he lives in his own universe.

Ciao,
Dscho