Live data from Hacker News

GitHub for Windows

github.com

241–248 of 248 posts

Re: GitHub for Windows

#241
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows isn't like OSX/Linux in that you can just store your keys in a .ssh folder and be done with it (at least not if you don't use cygwin/msys) Then, by all means, use Cygwin or anything that helps you, even if it doesn't come with Windows, if it isn't provided by Microsoft, doesn't look familiar and if it doesn't play well with Visual Studio. If you code for Windows you are coding against an insanely complicate…

It's not a question of familiarity, it's that git doesn't play nice on Windows. It requires a POSIX emulation environment, like cygwin, which is a second class experience. Compare this with Mercurial, which runs great from the command line on multiple platforms. I actually prefer the command line for SCM work, but git makes it hard.

> It requires a POSIX emulation environment, like cygwin, which is a second class experience.

I understand Cygwin is a layer of Linux on top of the Windows kernel, but didn't Windows have some POSIX support built in?

Re: GitHub for Windows

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not insulting to point out that the instructions are very simple, easy to follow, and easy to understand. Everyone here is smart enough to understand these things, and it's utterly bewildering that they angrily refuse to spend 5 minutes learning about something new in order to use something new.

Here you ask for five minutes of learning, later in this thread you seem to (correct me) expect people to get a good grasp on ssh and key management to avoid being 'dangerous'. Is both correct? Or would you agree that 5min to learn how ssh works, even for a broad overview, is not exactly helping / changing anything.

Two different issues got mixed together here, and I wasn't good at distinguishing them in my comments.

It should take five minutes for them to learn the basics of public key crypto so that their eyes don't glaze over when you say "public key", "private key", "fingerprint", or "RSA". I consider this basic knowledge absolutely essential for anyone using these concepts, even indirectly. Without it, you're dangerous.

Once those concepts are in place, it shouldn't even take five minutes for them to understand what SSH is doing, because SSH is a very simple and obvious application of the concepts. It should be self-evident from the brief discussions in github's instructions what is going on.

And once you've taken the five minutes to understand the concepts, not being dangerous is likewise simple and obvious:

* Put a good passphrase on your key.

* Don't share your key with others.

* Don't type in the passphrase for your key on any computer you don't trust at least as much as your own.

Notice how these aren't fundamentally different from protecting a password.

We are talking about inherently intelligent people with a good capacity for learning. It is mind-boggling to me that anyone would argue that these people should not have to spend five minutes to understand at even the most basic, limited level, how critical tools they want to use work.

Re: GitHub for Windows

#244
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why github will beat your social code management site.

in popularity, but not in functionality or in intelligence of user.

Mensa has a lot of intelligent members, but that doesn't mean it's good for anything.

Re: GitHub for Windows

#245
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in popularity, but not in functionality or in intelligence of user.

Mensa has a lot of intelligent members, but that doesn't mean it's good for anything.

Try to stay relevant please, Mensa has nothing to do with writing code.

Re: GitHub for Windows

#247
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's called that way because of some kind of naming convention that Windows expects from installers?

Nope. But I think it's a part of ClickOnce, the technology they use to bundle up an app into a setup.exe that fetches the latest source from a web server.

Nope. At work we have a similar setup.exe file. The setup.exe is a bootstrapper that installs prerequisites first, then runs the ClickOnce installer which is separate.

Re: GitHub for Windows

#248
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mensa has a lot of intelligent members, but that doesn't mean it's good for anything.

Try to stay relevant please, Mensa has nothing to do with writing code.

Thanks for the reminder. I was responding to your comment about "intelligence of the user". My point is that, while it is a metric you can compete on, it's not a particularly meaningful one.
Post reply on HN