Pushing after merge considered harmful

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 04:23:34AM +0900 I heard the voice of
Stephen J. Turnbull, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> Yeah, but where do you get this underlying understanding?  Where do
> you even find out about the existence of the param?

Oh, that's easy.  Osmosis.  You just hang out in the IRC channel and
the mailing list for 3 years.  Easy peasy.  It worked for me, and I
didn't have to even learn python or gracefully accept OOP.

Nobody argues that the docs don't severely lack here.  I have my own
ideas about how to fix that.  I'm not doing so because I never have a
lot of time blocks that can sink into it.  Right now, I've got about
36.5 hours a day (I counted) of work to do in deep crunch on a
project, and I also wound up chairman of a hamfest we're putting on
this weekend (if I survive that long and manage to squeeze in the rest
of the prep, which I estimate at about 4 weeks).  Luckily, then
that'll be done, and I'll just have more impossible deadlines on a
project we said we couldn't do in the first place.

That's why I have those IRC logs on my wiki page; because after the
4th or 5th time I tried to braindump my understanding of this or that
piece of the structure, I decided it would be easier to just yank the
best try out of my logs and stick it somewhere it could be referred
to.  And every one of them says "this should be turned into
documentation" at the top because reading somebody else's conversation
is a lousy way to pick up knowledge.  But it's better than nothing,
and 'nothing' is my present alternative to putting them up there.


> The problem is that Bazaar, too, has its plumbing and porcelain,
> which puts several layers between the user and the underlying model.

And as I mentioned in my other mail, bzr's social aim prevents it
from, like git, making a big deal of the plumbing in its presentation;
we're more supposed to cover it up and pretend like it's not even
there.  As in any case, information hiding works great to simplify
things, until you need to know what's under the covers, then it makes
things harder.


-- 
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.