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Simple Revision Control

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121–130 of 179 posts

Re: Simple Revision Control

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think it's fair to consider whether everyone with gender identity issues might simply be delusional?

This is a hostile environment, nobody can have a rational conversation about this without burning a lot karma (of which you have more to spare). Nobody here except those that have those experiences has anything useful to say about non-cis gender identity. Possibly also psychiatrists/psychologists not married to a particular ideology on the topic. From my admittedly few conversations with transgendered people, it's co…

Raymond introduced the word "delusional" to the conversation, not me.

World's tiniest violin &c &c for how hostile the environment is on HN for this discussion. Affectionately, ~~~your friendly neighborhood NSA agent.

Re: Simple Revision Control

#122
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of you brave souls who downvote me. I'm wondering which part of my statement you disagree with. - You think homosexual are pedophiles? - It's not important what he thinks about homosexuals. You're going to support him by using his software. If he had held the same hate speech about women in 2014, everyone would be here talking how imbecile this guy is.

People can have different political, religious, etc. views than you, but why should that influence whether you use his software or not? Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it? What if those views (or your own) change over time and you disagree with them?

This is not some mundane left wing vs right wing discussion. It's a guy who believes that homosexuals should be taken on the same level as pedophiles. The line between saying this and saying homosexuals should go to prison is thin at best.

Re: Simple Revision Control

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think it's fair to consider whether everyone with gender identity issues might simply be delusional?

Let's assume you mean "fair" in the sense of "reasonable", not "equitable here". Let's assume you mean "delusional" to mean "maintaining beliefs not supported by evidence and refusing to change said beliefs once presented with evidence". I'm going to leave off a stronger clause that would include non-falsifiable beliefs, because that way lies all manner of distraction. Let's also assume that you mean "gender identity…

Voted you back up.

You're applying a lot of charity to what Raymond wrote, which is a good thing; unfortunately having a full context for all of ESRs positions on a variety of issues has burned away most of the charity I could apply to him.

Like I said: there's a pattern to Raymond's public policy writing: people who look and act and think the way Raymond does are valorized, and people who don't are stigmatized. In isolation any of his beliefs might be defensible (as you're trying to do with this particular one), but taken as a whole, it's hard to believe that the problem is "everyone besides Raymond", rather than just Raymond.

Re: Simple Revision Control

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dropped out of highschool and attended no postsecondary and I don't have any problems with Git. Git problems arise when people want to do moderately sophisticated things, beyond just committing changes and viewing logs and diffs. > If git commit and git checkout are too complicated, If "If git commit and git checkout are too complicated" is your argument, then you aren't doing anything more sophisticated with git…

I think you may have misunderstood my comment, of course there is more to it then checkout and commit. Those are the basics, that's where you start. Then you get stuck somehow, and you read more . That's what I did at least. IMO It's about not giving yourself the impression that the learning curve is insurmountable, you can do it. Starting with the basics and growing up is, I thought, common knowledge for acquiring a…

I perfectly understand that there are hordes of programmers for whom messing around with git is far more interesting than the actual code they are working on.

"Man, I just interactively rebased my last six changes so the commits are in a different order, and two of them were squashed into one! Boy, does that feel productive."

Re: Simple Revision Control

#125
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's ESR in 2013 arguing that transexuality and gender identity issues are disorders comparable to schizophrenia. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5015

My sister is a psychiatrist and has the same opinion on the subject. There's nothing wrong with postulating and analysing it, even if the views are perhaps unpopular. Nothing should be beyond discussion even if it's uncomfortable for some people. Without making a judgement (I have no opinion on this myself), all arguments need contrast.

My sister is a domestic violence legal clinic attorney and doesn't. I guess we're at an impasse.

We are of course in the weeds here. The question was, "does Raymond still think the way he did in that post from 2002?" The evidence seems dispositive: yes.

Re: Simple Revision Control

#126
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a good idea. People often don't bother version-controlling simple stuff because it's a hassle. I routinely use my own rdiff/rsync scripts but this is not something you find in every system and also not something most people would use. A barebones, simple, no-install, easy, not-necessarily-for-experienced-developers VCS is a good thing to have. BTW it's going at 1 release per day. Heh :-)

It's actually a good idea. People often don't bother version-controlling simple stuff because it's a hassle. Here's the thing that's funny to me: git is easy . Everyone (especially mercurial users) goes on about how horrible the UI is, but when I think of git, I think of how similar it is to RCS: easy, quick, and simple. With both, I can diff things and check in changes very quickly. I have a bunch of single files in…

I use it all the time, but there are situations and environments where it's overkill. Same with Mercurial. For starters it requires installation and that they is effectively a deterrent for many people especially non-devs.

Re: Simple Revision Control

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can have different political, religious, etc. views than you, but why should that influence whether you use his software or not? Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it? What if those views (or your own) change over time and you disagree with them?

(ESR aside) Why not? If I believe that someone's exposed views are harmful, doesn't it make sense to avoid increasing his/her overall influence? I mean, the fact that we're discussing ESR's views on pedophilia shows that his influence in an unrelated area (software) increases the exposure of those views. If he was just a nobody like me, would we be discussing his blog post on Catholic priests? Not likely. Do you chec…

Maybe we respond more to the milieu of a comment more than its actual content. Personally I like conspiracy theories about topical things. I never believe them but they make me chuckle to see the world from a weird point of view. But some people are going to find such theories to be horribly offensive (like Buzz Aldrin about moon fakery). We all have the capacity to wrongly analyse something we don't understand and have no stake in. A lot of people don't know what it is like to be attracted to their own gender and come out with things that are not just offensive but blatantly silly. The rest of us no better.

Re: Simple Revision Control

#129
post #65
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing un-nice about that article. It's a reasoned argument. You may disagree with its conclusion, and you can write your own refutation of it. But it has nothing to do with ESR's niceness.

This is the Internet in 2014. We don't refute controversial arguments, we scream "wow, just wow, hate speech, what a bigot", publicly shame and defame their character and derail their careers. We're enlightened now.

I agree with the sentiment, but I think that attempting to refute an argument and being personally disgusted by people who make a particular argument, not doing business with them, and advising others not to do business with them are not mutually exclusive choices.

You don't want to tip into the "people hating me because of something I said is an abridgement of my god-given right to free-speech" crowd. You have to be responsible for both what you say, and also for how people interpret what you say in order to be an effective communicator.

Re: Simple Revision Control

#130
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a good idea. People often don't bother version-controlling simple stuff because it's a hassle. I routinely use my own rdiff/rsync scripts but this is not something you find in every system and also not something most people would use. A barebones, simple, no-install, easy, not-necessarily-for-experienced-developers VCS is a good thing to have. BTW it's going at 1 release per day. Heh :-)

It's actually a good idea. People often don't bother version-controlling simple stuff because it's a hassle. Here's the thing that's funny to me: git is easy . Everyone (especially mercurial users) goes on about how horrible the UI is, but when I think of git, I think of how similar it is to RCS: easy, quick, and simple. With both, I can diff things and check in changes very quickly. I have a bunch of single files in…

Git is terrible.

Git is typical of a tool built by engineers. It has good primitives but a clunky overall design and horrible UI. It does not naturally encourage the most effective modes of use. Hell, even the "best practices" of the git community are highly questionable (just rewrite history for aesthetic reasons, what could go wrong?).

Git is highly tuned to the use case of serving linux kernel development. Many other folks have figured out decent ways to use it effectively as well but don't mistake that for Git being an unquestionably good tool or for it being "easy". Sure, the core workflow is pretty straightforward, but the fact that the easy stuff is easy is not a ringing endorsement of a tool. Good tools make hard stuff easier and easy stuff trivial.

Make no mistake, I think there are lots of awesome parts of git, the most important being its distributed nature. It's trivial to setup a repository because everything is a repository. That's pretty potent, and git has some reasonably well engineered components inside of it which make it fast for many common use cases, which is fantastic. But a big part of why git has been so successful lately has been because it hasn't had a lot of competition. Much of the competition is either hugely expensive (perforce, TFS), doesn't match the use case (same), hugely outdated (SVN), or terrible (TFS). The main competition for git is Mercurial, and a big reason git won out over Hg is because of mindshare traction and network effect from linux kernel development and then github.

The biggest problem now is that so many git fans are afraid of criticizing git's shortcomings.

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