Pushing after merge considered harmful

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 08:48:49PM +0200 I heard the voice of
Eli Zaretskii, and lo! it spake thus:
>
> You just need to do it, methodically, thoroughly, from the ground
> up.

Quite.

> How hard could it be to explain the effect of a few commands on a
> DAG?  Do that in some orderly fashion, and the rest is indeed
> trivial.  We are programmers here, we know what a DAG is, or can
> learn in a few minutes.

Well, no, actually, when you're positioning yourself as the "friendly"
VCS for non-programmer "regular people", you /can't/ do stuff like
that.  It's a violation of nobody's expectations to say "DAG" in the
first 3 sentences of documentation for git, because Everybody
Knows(tm) that git is obscure and aimed at Talosians with pulsing
veins on their head.

It is in bzr, because Everybody Knows(tm) that it's supposed to be
aimed at people who would never touch something down at that level,
and it's supposed to be so easy you don't have to _learn_ anything
beforehand to use.  And in a far less ridiculously caricatured way,
that's the market segment bzr is implicitly claiming as a
differentiating feature.

Which is total rubbish, and facially impossible.  But the only way to
really ride Roman across that divide is to have two sets of
documentation, a "soft" set for the masses, and a "hard" set for the
cranky brainiacs.  Which is easy; all you need is double the
documentation manpower.  When I doubt anybody would argue other than
that we're way short on resources to get ONE set of good documentation
together, much less TWO.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.