Pushing after merge considered harmful

[Jason Earl]

John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:05:26 -0600
>>> From: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd at over-yonder.net>
>>> Cc: stephen at xemacs.org, bialix at ukr.net, bazaar at lists.canonical.com
>>>
>>>> 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.
>>
>> How many such non-programmer users are among Bazaar users?  Did
>> anybody bother to take a poll?  My guess would be zero.  Why would a
>> non-programmer use a VCS?
>>
>> If I'm right, there's no need to double the documentation manpower.
>
> It is most distinctly non-zero. The ubuntu documentation group
> specifically uses this, and has a significant fraction of people with
> a graphic design style background, and minimal 'programming'
> experience.
>
> It also gets used for versioning office style documents, and people
> who are using it to version $HOME (though I believe those are mostly
> programmers using it for something else).

I've introduced any number of people to Subversion with very basic
computer skills.  At some point almost everyone is faced with the
situation of having to collaborate with a group of people on a set of
files.  At a certain point it becomes easier to teach people to use a
version control system than it is to juggle documents using a simple
file share or via email.

Programmers tend to bump into these limits all the time, but I have set
up enough Subversion repositories for non-technical groups to verify
that this sort of thing happens to non-programmers as well.

By the way, I use Subversion for these tasks primarily because it
handles large files well.  I would like to use bzr, but I can not (yet).

To be honest I find the idea that Bazaar might want to borrow
documentation tips from git simply ridiculous.  The primary reason that
I *don't* use git is that I did not want to have to learn what my VCS
was doing under the covers to get some work done.  Git's documentation
covers its object model right after the Introduction, for crying out
loud.

That sort of documentation might appeal to the sort of people that build
their own editor from parts using Emacs Lisp[1], but I really do not
think that this is the target audience that bzr should be aiming for.

Jason

Footnotes: 
[1]  I happen to use (and love) Emacs, but I stopped pretending a long
     time ago that the modern Emacs community was in any way shape or
     form "typical."