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ways in which git makes the opposite of sense to me

Filed under: Hacking,Python,Twisted — Thomas @ 14:05

2009-02-06
14:05

DISCLAIMER: I originally wrote this post 18 months ago but never posted it because it was unusually negative.

Recently, with GStreamer switching to git, and GNOME thinking of moving to it as well, I thought I'd pick the post back up and see if git had improved since writing it. For me, the most frustrating things about git are:

  • the user interface experience is the absolute worst of all of them since tla was around
  • there is no obvious way to do it - clearly shown by the 50 different git tutorials, and the myriads of git commands that are very similar-sounding and have strange descriptions that to the layman sound like they would do the same thing

Personally, I remain convinced that it would be easy to start a git hater's blog (much like the linux hater's one) and fill it with content, though I doubt that will stop me from using it in practice.

Feel free to rush to the defense of git, insult me, call me stupid, whatever you want! I just thought it'd be an interesting exercise to see if my frustrated vitriol from last time still held up.

I'll annotate each part with today's experience in italics, and finish off with a final git score.

Exhibit A:

[thomas@ana git]$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
[thomas@ana git]$ mkdir t
[thomas@ana git]$ git add t
The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files:
t (directory)
Use -f if you really want to add them.
[thomas@ana git]$ find . -name ".gitignore"

There is no .gitignore file, so what are you talking about ?

2009: this now actually works without problems. Score one for git! 1 out of 1 for git usability improvements.

Exhibit B:

[thomas@ana tmp]$ git clone gt clone
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/thomas/tmp/clone/.git/
fatal: 'gt': unable to chdir or not a git archive
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fetch-pack from 'gt' failed.

Ok, so I have a typo. But this is how you choose to let me know ?
"unable to chdir" OR "not a git archive". Hey, YOU're the computer. And git, you're the program tracking these things, you can't tell the difference between a git archive and something that is not ? Why don't YOU tell me which of the two it is instead of failing to handle errors in a logical way.

Also, I have no idea how it knew that I was on the phone with my mom and my mom got angry at something I said and ended the conversation. Oh ,wait, that wasn't what you were referring to when talking about unexpected hangups ?

And I thought fatal meant fatal. Apparently the first fatal was not fatal enough to already stop, you prefer confusing me with another fatal. Which one of the two should I be fixing ?

Kudos though for cleaning up the failed creation of the clone repository.

Please, when I make this simple mistake, tell me only: "The repository 'gt' does not exist."

2009: behaviour exactly the same. 1 out of 2 for git usability improvements.

Exhibit C:

[thomas@ana clone]$ ls /usr/bin/git-* | wc
139     139    3158

Compared with

[thomas@ana clone]$ ls /usr/bin/e* | wc
69      69    1244

I would say that the Lobby For Commands In /usr/bin Starting With G has gone a little overboard here.

2009: only 131 commands left for git. In the interest of preserving my sanity I'm not even going to try figure out which ones got removed or replaced or folded. 1 out of 3 for git usability improvements.

Exhibit D

Maybe that last one was an unfair stab ? Maybe 139 binaries come for free anyway so I should not complain ? I wasn't sure either first. Until I took two random entries from there and ran:

[thomas@ana clone]$ git whatchanged -h
fatal: unrecognized argument: -h
[thomas@ana clone]$ git citool -h
usage: /usr/bin/git-citool
[thomas@ana clone]$

Care to guess how many of these binaries have no useful -h output ? I sure don't want to find out, there's 139 binaries to check. 130 of them have manpages though - I guess that could be one reason why git implements "git command" by having a binary "git-command" - how else are you going to document this monster ?

What I *really* wanted to do when finding this out is to find a command that would show me which files are not under version control and give that to me in the most easy to parse way. git status is something, but maybe one of those 138 other commands gives me something better ?

(answer after some random command 'bisecting': git ls-files --others)

2009: behaviour has changed, but is still unhelpful

[thomas@ana git]$ git whatchanged -h
fatal: bad default revision 'HEAD'
[thomas@ana git]$ git citool -h

The last one now pops up a TK dialog box that says "couldn't open /usr/share/git-gui/lib/tclIndex": no such file or directory. 1 out of 4 for git usability improvements.

Exhibit E:

In my quest to figure out what some git commands do without wading through the man pages, I've resigned myself to the black box approach.


[thomas@ana clone]$ git describe
fatal: cannot describe '02d3a05f1e9710f9a6683ed8a62c9bd2ff3680a8'

For once I must side with git on this one. I have no way to describe that hex string either.

2009: output changed, but equally unhelpful:

fatal: Not a valid object name HEAD

Still inclined to side with git, I don't name my objects HEAD either. 1 out of 5 for git usability improvements.

Exhibit F:
I'm following this simple tutorial and it suggests that git has a slightly different model for committing. Most VCS systems have you "add" paths to tell the VCS you want to track them. Git seems to have something in addition - it has "files that it tracks", "files that it tracks and is going to commit in the next changeset", and "files that it doesn't track". git add then seems to be used to add to "the next changeset", and as a result also add it to "files that it tracks". A little confusing, but OK. So basically, to do a commit, you must add files to the commit.

The tutorial explains that you can do both at once by using git commit -a. Obviously the two step process of committing was so unintuitive that they made an option do to both, and the tutorial thinks this shortcut is important enough to mention.

Except that this happens:

[thomas@ana git]$ touch 1
[thomas@ana git]$ git commit 1
error: pathspec '1' did not match any file(s) known to git.
Did you forget to 'git add'?
[thomas@ana git]$ git add 1
[thomas@ana git]$ git commit 1
Created commit 79e67c26b27c80f7f0ddc37293cbc022f932c968
 0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 1
[thomas@ana git]$ touch 2
[thomas@ana git]$ git commit -a 2
Paths with -a does not make sense.
[thomas@ana git]$

I guess I should be lucky it didn't call me stupid outright. It may not make sense to you, git, but I guess this is how my intuition works when I read your tutorial and you've already made it clear to me that you're not planning to have your help or usage output to be helpful or useful or for that matter even be period.

As a hint, here's what I expect to happen when I run git commit -a 2:

  1. git adds the file 2 to the next commit
  2. git commits the change to file 2

That wasn't so hard to make sense of now, was it ?

2009: slightly different behaviour. First off, the actually helpful suggestion from before (did you forget to add 1) is now gone. Why ? The second part is still the same, exactly as is. 1 out of 6 for git usability improvements (and actually a step back).

Exhibit G:

[thomas@otto git]$ ls /home/thomas/tmp/git/repo/.git/
branches/    description  hooks/       objects/
config       HEAD         info/        refs/
[thomas@otto git]$ git checkout /home/thomas/tmp/git/repo
fatal: Not a git repository

What do you mean, not a git repository ? I gave you one argument that clearly is a repository. Could you try and tell me what is wrong in a way that us humans can read ?

2009: different error:

[thomas@ana git]$ git checkout /home/thomas/tmp/git
error: pathspec '' did not match any file(s) known to git.

I'm guessing I should be giving it an additional argument. Hey, wouldn't that be a nice understandable error message instead ? 1 out of 7 for git usability improvements.

Exhibit H:

gitk is in Tk. Tk !!! 1991 called and they ... Oh never mind, not even going there. No, really. Start it up and click on 'File'. Then move the mouse pointer to 'Edit'. Is it just me, expecting the logical thing to happen, while nothing happens at all ? At a guess, this behaviour was probably for those people who were logging in to a remote X server over a 300 baud modem.

2009: still the same. To be fair, the application is actually pretty useful, you'd almost forgive it being written in tk. Still, 1 out of 8 for git usability improvements.

If you're still here, feel free to point out where git's behaviour really was my fault. I'm all for learning more about why things are the way they are. I'm just not convinced at all yet that git has made huge inroads on the usability level as its defenders often claim when discussing git vs. bzr.

Scrolling LED Marquee part two

Filed under: Hacking,Python,Twisted — Thomas @ 10:39

10:39

Following up on a previous post, I've been writing some code to do useful things with my scrolling LED marquee.

It gave me a chance to try my hand at implementing another protocol in Twisted, and it was a pleasurable experience. I still firmly believe that Twisted's code and design combines so much knowledge about these things that I will now never have to have in my life because I can rely on it being designed properly for the task.

I got it working quite quickly, reusing some activatestate code for a feedparser, and now I have my marquee following a bunch of feeds like StackOverflow's python tags, SlashDot and VRT news.

Here is a link to the video of the marquee showing (old) news from slashdot (using Cortado to watch it), or a link to a playlist to open in a player, or a link to the Ogg file directly.

I had the original version working over the serial port, but these days a serial port is a hassle. The marquee also included a USB plug which has a built-in serial port, and it didn't work out of the box with that. After some fiddling I realized that for some reason, over USB the replies of the device (which sends 'ACK' to acknowledge) come in separate packets (sometimes two, sometimes three, one per letter). It was simple to fix in the protocol implementation, and that's where Twisted's levels of abstraction really shine - a simple fix in one location at exactly the right logical level.

Last night I added a quick and dirty hack to have it also display what song Elisa is playing. I should start worrying about managing the marquee's different pages now so that it can easily mix different information sources.

Oh yeah, the code. Not sure you'd find anything interesting there if you don't actually have a scrolling marquee, but here it is. If you have a similar device, I'd be happy to help you out get this set up and add support for it.

And if any Twisted people want to comment and help me improve my probably poorly implemented protocol, comments appreciated!

platform-4

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 12:01

2009-02-04
12:01

For the longest time our internal platform-4 release seemed like a classic code death march gone wrong. I took some comfort recently reading Dreaming in Code, the story of Chandler, and realized that we could have done worse. (That's actually a better book than I expected, but I'll save that for another post).

Anyway, platform-4 has been in production for a while now, but it is hard to create a definite milestone of 'now we did it' on a system that takes a while to deploy fully.

People involved in planning are optimists at heart - making a plan and trying to stick to it just isn't in a pessimist's nature because the pessimist thinks planning is a lost cause to start with. (This is just a personal opinion - obviously schedules fail for a lot of reasons in the real world - but I do believe this to be a fundamental piece of the planning and delay problem.)

platform-4 became the lightning rod for all the frustration the whole company was having. When things go bad people look for something obvious to blame, preferably something that can be named with a simple single word ('Bush' anyone ?) It's just basic human psychology. platform-4 became that thing for us.

So after deploying, I wanted to take back the word platform-4 and turn it into something good for everyone in a simple way. And what better way in a tech company to celebrate something than make a nice t-shirt ?

All the shirts have the same front (spot the 4), but a personalized back with a phrase relating their work to platform-4. Just like platform-4, the actual making of the shirts became a death march on its own. I started with some phrases, asked Arek and Aitor for help, and we spent a few weeks passing spreadsheets back and forth to decide on namings. It took a while to decide on the shirt type, the color, the front design, the fonts, and everything. Eduardo was patiently incorporating our feedback while trying to keep it on the down-low from his manager. In the end it probably took three months to do something as simple as get a few t-shirts made.

Almost all the shirts are in the picture, so I'd say people are happy with the results. Maybe you'll spot some of them at FOSDEM this year, because our whole development team is going, as well as a big chunk of our support team.

Please take a note of Xavier, our Product manager, second from the top left, who for some reason was excited to get on this blog. Sorry ladies, the man's already spoken for.

Big thanks to Arek and Aitor for coming up with phrases, Edu for the great design, and Jean-Noel for providing the funds!

It is a strange day

Filed under: Fluendo,Work — Thomas @ 01:32

01:32

when a meeting with our commercial people energizes me more than a meeting with our development people.

Good to swing to the other side - now to find the balance...

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