bzr-gtk vs. QBzr

[Colin D Bennett]

On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:15:34 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Karl Fogel writes:
>  > Colin D Bennett <colin at gibibit.com> writes:
>  > > Sadly, all the TortoiseSVN users I know (my team members on a
>  > > university project) have no clue how to do basic operations like
>  > > "diff", "revert", "switch", etc. which are simple in the command line,
>  > > but you have to find the right menu option (diff is "Create Patch", I
>  > > think) for it.  I'd like to tell them, "just run 'svn diff'", but they
>  > > have no idea that there is even a command line for Subversion!
>  > 
>  > Which is fine.  Command lines are not morally better :-).
> 
> Not morally better in principle, but certainly strong evidence in VCS
> practice.  Suppose Colin is correct that the members of his team don't
> know how to diff or revert.  Then use of a VCS is merely bureaucracy
> that will allow them to be convicted of negligence in court, but won't
> help them *avoid* the defects that allow students' private information
> to be broadcast on the Internet or whatever is going to show up in
> Peter Newman's column next.  I also think it's really telling that
> gitk is Russel Winder's visualizer of (no equally good ;-) choice.

I guess the problem that I have encountered is that several people I
know are using TortoiseSVN but have basically just installed it,
checked out a branch, and tried to figure it out by poking around the
menus.  It's easy to poke around the 24-item context menu of TSVN and
try to figure things out, but it's not always a good idea, at least in
my experience.

I have seen *more than one person* try to use the "Import" to add files
to our project branch, which instead created a new Subversion
repository within our project branch!

I think that if they had only a command line tool, then they would
either (1) ask for help or (2) look up the command before using it on a
real project.  Therefore I think that all VCS users should learn the
command line first and a GUI second.

Regards,
Colin
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