Subject: Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 10:45:31 +0200

Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sat, 13 Oct 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
>>
>> Not everybody is a "doer". It's important to get input from people who are 
>> just plain users, or hope to be.
> 
> A pity, but you're probably right.
> 

It's not a pity, and he's most definitely right. Users tend to think in terms
of "I'd like to get this task done" while coders tend to think in terms of
"this would be cool/possible to implement". The reason git actually *works* so
great is, I'm sure, the fact that it was originally designed around a very specific
need by someone thinking like a *user*. The fact that it happened to be a pretty
competent programmer just meant he could express his wishes as algorithms in a
programming language and make it happen.

I'm 100% sure that if Linus had been so interested in SCM's that he'd abandoned
the Linux kernel to be full-time maintainer for git instead, it would have had
all sorts of oddities in it that nobody uses, just because they're possible to
do.

I also think Linus made a very wise decision in picking Junio to maintain it. So
far, I haven't seen him accept a single feature-patch into git that wasn't
explained to solve a specific problem.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231