RFC: migrating to git

[wren ng thornton]

On 1/12/11 5:34 PM, Tim Chevalier wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Malcolm Wallace<malcolm.wallace at me.com>  wrote:
>> If I were considering contributing minor patches to a project, the use of
>> git would probably not deter me too much - I can cope with the simple stuff.
>>   But if I wanted more major involvement, git would definitely cause me to
>> think twice about whether to bother.
>
> I agree with Malcolm (and with Neil's later post); I wanted to issue a
> me-too because of all of the pro-git messages I've been seeing. I've
> been using git for two years at my job. I still can't do anything but
> the most basic tasks. When I try to read the documentation, the
> documentation (a) is incomprehensible and (b) tells me that I'm stupid
> because I find it incomprehensible. I found darcs easy to learn and it
> has always made sense to me. I've lost work and had to recreate it by
> hand because of git.

Me three, FWIW. Casual use of git is as easy as casual use of any modern 
VCS or DVCS, but even moderately sophisticated use is beyond my ken and 
(evidently) beyond the documenting abilities of the community. Anything 
that can't be clearly documented sets off warning bells. Conversely, 
moderately sophisticated use of darcs was extremely easy for me to 
acquire, and I find working with darcs repos much more pleasant than the 
alternatives I deal with regularly.

I haven't had the opportunity to contribute to GHC yet, though I've been 
meaning to change that recently. I can't say whether git would cause me 
to decide against contributing, but it would raise the barrier to entry 
and make it more likely that I just wouldn't find the time to follow 
through with such contributions.

-- 
Live well,
~wren