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   9                         <h1>Dscho's git log</h1>
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  11                         <table width=400px bgcolor=#e0e0e0 border=0>
  12                         <tr><th>Table of contents:</th></tr>
  13                         <tr><td>
  14                         <p><ul>
  15                         <li><a href=#1276255806>11 Jun 2010 New msysGit imminent</a>
  16                         <li><a href=#1265634257>08 Feb 2010 Trying to get more time for msysGit</a>
  17                         <li><a href=#1259765885>02 Dec 2009 Avoiding to get angry</a>
  18                         <li><a href=#1255867912>18 Oct 2009 Git will never be user-friendly</a>
  19                         <li><a href=#1254868748>07 Oct 2009 GitTogether in Berlin</a>
  20                         <li><a href=#1249835938>09 Aug 2009 The dilemma of being correct</a>
  21                         <li><a href=#1245419588>19 Jun 2009 The GraphGUI project</a>
  22                         <li><a href=#1242408298>15 May 2009 Wasting way too much time on msysGit</a>
  23                         <li><a href=#1241995759>11 May 2009 Working on jgit diff</a>
  24                         <li><a href=#1239975597>17 Apr 2009 No time for Git</a>
  25                         </ul></p>
  26                         <a href=dscho.git?a=blob_plain;hb=bcbae592bcf8e15fb4a1a7fdf96f942732e7db92;f=index.html>Older posts</a>
  27                         </td></tr></table>
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  36                         <table width=400px bgcolor=#e0e0e0 border=0>
  37                         <tr><th>About this blog:</th></tr>
  38                         <tr><td>
  39                         <p>It is an active <a href=http://repo.or.cz/w/git/dscho.git?a=blob_plain;f=index.html;hb=5f002cab57a837125a8f901bcd1f3c1477bc3119>abuse</a> of <a href=http://repo.or.cz/>repo.or.cz</a>,
  40                         letting gitweb unpack the objects in the current tip of the branch <i>blog</i>,
  41                         including the images and the RSS feed.
  42                         </p><p>
  43                         Publishing means running a script that collects the posts, turns them into
  44                         HTML, makes sure all the images are checked in, and pushes the result.
  45                         </p><p>
  46                         This blog also serves to grace the world with Dscho's random thoughts on and
  47                         around Git.
  48                         </p>
  49                         </td></tr></table>
  50                         <br>
  51                         <table width=400px bgcolor=#e0e0e0 border=0>
  52                         <tr><th>Links:</th></tr>
  53                         <tr><td>
  54                         <ul>
  55                         <li> <a href=http://git-scm.com/>Git's homepage</a>
  56                         <li> <a href=http://gitster.livejournal.com/>Junio's blog</a>
  57                         <li> <a href=http://www.spearce.org/>Shawn's blog</a> seems to be sitting
  58                               idle ever since he started working for Google...
  59                         <li> <a href=http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/>Linus' blog</a> does not
  60                               talk much about Git...
  61                         <li> Scott Chacon's <a href=http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/>Why Git is better
  62                              than X</a> site
  63                         <li> <a href=http://vilain.net/>The blog of mugwump</a>
  64                         <li> <a href=http://merlyn.vox.com/>Merlyn's blog</a>
  65                         <li> <a href=http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/>Elijah Newren</a> chose the
  66                               same path as Cogito, offering an alternative porcelain (an approach
  67                               that is doomed in my opinion)
  68                         <li> <a href=http://msysgit.googlecode.com/>The msysGit project</a>, a (mostly)
  69                               failed experiment to lure the many Windows developers out there to
  70                               contribute to Open Source for a change.
  71                         </ul>
  72                         </td></tr></table>
  73                         <br>
  74                         <table width=400px bgcolor=#e0e0e0 border=0>
  75                         <tr><th>Google Ads:</th></tr>
  76                         <tr><td>
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  88                         </td></tr></table>
  89                         </div>
  90                         <h6>Friday, 11th of June, Anno Domini MMX, at the hour of the Goat</h6>
  91                         <a name=1276255806>
  92                         <h2>New msysGit imminent</h2>
  93
  94                         <p>
  95                         </p><p>
  96                         Sebastian Schuberth worked so much on msysGit, and he wants a new release. That is the reason why there will be a new msysGit version very soon.
  97                         </p>
  98                         <h6>Monday, 8th of February, Anno Domini MMX, at the hour of the Goat</h6>
  99                         <a name=1265634257>
 100                         <h2>Trying to get more time for msysGit</h2>
 101
 102                         <p>
 103                         </p><p>
 104                         Nowadays, the msysGit project is driven forward mostly by Heiko Voigt,
 105                         Erik Faye-Lund, and of course the invaluable mingw.git work of Hannes
 106                         Sixt. The new-SVN, MinGW-SVN and MinGW-Python projects have stalled.
 107                         The latest msysGit release is <u>months</u> old.
 108                         </p><p>
 109                         It does not help that certain people on the Git mailing list write
 110                         looooong emails that nobody with my schedule can hope to read, rather
 111                         than being nice and spending some time to phrase what they have to
 112                         say in a <u>concise</u> manner.
 113                         </p><p>
 114                         Oh well. I will just concentrate on JGit and msysGit instead of
 115                         upstream Git, if I get some Git time.
 116                         </p>
 117                         <h6>Wednesday, 2nd of December, Anno Domini MMIX, at the hour of the Monkey</h6>
 118                         <a name=1259765885>
 119                         <h2>Avoiding to get angry</h2>
 120
 121                         <p>
 122                         </p><p>
 123                         Despite many intelligent people realizing that the recent
 124                         change to special case http, https and ftp was a terrible decision, it
 125                         seems that there is enough resistance left on the Git mailing list to
 126                         keep the brain-dead current state.
 127                         </p><p>
 128                         The Git mailing list is definitely giving me more grief than joy these
 129                         days.
 130                         </p>
 131                         <h6>Sunday, 18th of October, Anno Domini MMIX, at the hour of the Goat</h6>
 132                         <a name=1255867912>
 133                         <h2>Git will never be user-friendly</h2>
 134
 135                         <p>
 136                         </p><p>
 137                         Recently, encouraged by quite some private encouragement, I thought I could
 138                         take on the task of teaching the core Git developers how user-unfriendly
 139                         Git is, and that they should be more open to change (especially given that
 140                         1.7.0 was already announced to be a version that breaks recent expectations,
 141                         something I would have expected to merit a 2.0 -- but who am I anyway?).
 142                         </p><p>
 143                         It is quite ironic, in a very cruel sense, that those people who are such
 144                         big fans of educating the users instead of fixing their tools are unable
 145                         to be educated about something that should be obvious.
 146                         </p><p>
 147                         Yes, I am bitter.
 148                         </p>
 149                         <h6>Wednesday, 7th of October, Anno Domini MMIX, at the hour of the Rat</h6>
 150                         <a name=1254868748>
 151                         <h2>GitTogether in Berlin</h2>
 152
 153                         <p>
 154                         </p><p>
 155                         We had a GitTogether in Berlin, called "Alles wird Git" (past tense: "Alles
 156                         wurde Git").  It was great fun, we never had even a single boring minute,
 157                         and our special guest -- Gitzilla -- turned out to be quite some entertainer,
 158                         especially when he starting reciting a few of my most outrageous emails &#x263a;
 159                         </p><p>
 160                         There were a lot of good discussions, among other things about submodules (our
 161                         neglected child), Git Cheetah, and foreign VCS helpers (in particular Sverre's
 162                         plan to provide some Mercurial backend).
 163                         </p><p>
 164                         One of the most important outcomes for me was, though, to realize just how
 165                         detached we in the Git project are from our user base.  A few years back, we
 166                         could get away with saying "we have only developers as users, so they should
 167                         just sit down and scratch their own itch".
 168                         </p><p>
 169                         But today, we have a lot of users who never learnt to code (or who code in
 170                         some other language than C, or whose code we would not even want to review &#x263a;),
 171                         and we lose quite a few brownie points by keeping things complicated.
 172                         </p><p>
 173                         Now, in a lot of cases it cannot be helped.  For example, we have confusing
 174                         names for things, inconsistent namings even (as with "remote" vs "tracked"
 175                         branches), and we have some odd design decisions (like calling some program
 176                         almost nobody uses "git cherry", which makes tab-completion of the rather
 177                         often-used "git cherry-pick" pretty awkward).  The latter example also
 178                         illustrates that we have names for porcelains that are rather long, when
 179                         they should be rather short.
 180                         </p><p>
 181                         So, yes, we have a lot of things that do not work well, because we have
 182                         usability issues that need to be preserved for hysterical raisins.
 183                         </p><p>
 184                         This is unfortunate enough, but it seems that we even fsck up with usability
 185                         issues we <u>can</u> solve.  Just think about "git checkout -b origin/master".  A
 186                         typo?  Yes, of course!  But a rather obvious one.
 187                         </p><p>
 188                         Another case which was discussed on the mailing list recently: "git checkout
 189                         next" when clearly "git checkout origin/next" was meant.
 190                         </p><p>
 191                         The biggest problem, though, is that almost all people on the Git mailing list
 192                         who are respected by the maintainer are obviously too detached from the user
 193                         base to realize just how difficult Git <u>still</u> is.  And refuse to do anything
 194                         about it, or even to allow others to do anything about it.
 195                         </p><p>
 196                         It almost seems as if the Git wizards do not want Git to become easier to
 197                         use, lest they lose their special status.
 198                         </p><p>
 199                         My biggest problem is that it seems that my input gets more and more ignored,
 200                         or perceived as some crazy ideas that will just go away (which is true, because
 201                         I am pretty happy about a day-job that keeps me more than just busy, so I do not
 202                         have time not fight windmills, let alone motiviation to do so).
 203                         </p><p>
 204                         Even when a real user comes along to chime in, he's just brushed off, by an
 205                         otherwise very polite maintainer.
 206                         </p><p>
 207                         I am not even sure if I want to continue sending my patches from my personal
 208                         tree upstream, because things get so frustrating, for little to show in return.
 209                         </p>
 210                         <h6>Sunday, 9th of August, Anno Domini MMIX, at the hour of the Rooster</h6>
 211                         <a name=1249835938>
 212                         <h2>The dilemma of being correct</h2>
 213
 214                         <p>
 215                         </p><p>
 216                         So I am opinionated.  No news there.  The problem of being opinionated, though,
 217                         is that people do not take you seriously even if you are correct.
 218                         </p><p>
 219                         For example, I vividly remember having had concerns about the Git wrapper
 220                         being linked to <a href=http://curl.haxx.se/>cURL</a>, and I vividly remember
 221                         that our maintainer did not have such concerns and took Daniel's patch.  I could
 222                         not find proof of my public comment quickly enough to add a link here, though.
 223                         </p><p>
 224                         Alas, there are serious problems with being correct:
 225                         </p><p>
 226                         <ol>
 227                         <li>If you're correct, you waste a lot of time trying to convince people (but
 228                         they ignore you nevertheless),
 229                         <li>Other people are regularly p*ssed off, especially when they find out
 230                         (or even worse, when it is pointed out to them) that they were wrong, and
 231                         <li>You can buy <u>nothing</u> for having been correct.
 232                         </ol>
 233                         </p><p>
 234                         It is a lose-lose situation.
 235                         </p><p>
 236                         In the current context, I am pretty certain that the rev cache and the pack
 237                         index are so similar in nature that we'll find quite a few issues that we had
 238                         with one repeated with the other.
 239                         </p><p>
 240                         As I <u>hate</u> losing time over a discussion others try to "win" -- which
 241                         invariably means that they refuse to be convinced of anything disagreeing with
 242                         their opinion &#x263a; -- I will just shut up, and probably have one or two odd
 243                         feelings when it turns out I was right.
 244                         </p>
 245                         <h6>Friday, 19th of June, Anno Domini MMIX, at the hour of the Monkey</h6>
 246                         <a name=1245419588>
 247                         <h2>The GraphGUI project</h2>
 248
 249                         <p>
 250                         </p><p>
 251                         After a few unfortunate delays (and some fortunate ones, just not for us), the
 252                         GraphGUI project finally takes off.  A quick first glance:
 253                         </p><p>
 254                         <center><img src=dscho.git?a=blob_plain;hb=c33212b23b2b3e45c14403efe82cabb1cd53f6e3;f=basic-gui.jpg basic-gui.jpg></center>
 255                         </p><p>
 256                         The delays were a bit unnerving, but the student is really bright and still
 257                         has the chance to pull the project off.
 258                         </p><p>
 259                         Next plans are to show text, too, to invent a rudimentary layout engine that
 260                         can be adjusted manually (this is in contrast to <i>gitk</i> or <i>log --graph</i>).
 261                         </p><p>
 262                         After that, integration into JGit (this probably triggered the eGit/JGit
 263                         split).
 264                         </p><p>
 265                         And then we'll go wild!
 266                         </p>
 267                         <h6>Friday, 15th of May, Anno Domini MMIX, at the hour of the Dog</h6>
 268                         <a name=1242408298>
 269                         <h2>Wasting way too much time on msysGit</h2>
 270
 271                         <p>
 272                         </p><p>
 273                         I recently got into the bad habit of spending a large amount of my waking
 274                         hours working on msysGit, more than is really healthy for me.
 275                         </p><p>
 276                         For example, I spent the whole morning -- when I should have worked on a
 277                         very important day-job project -- on trying to fix issue 258, where
 278                         <i>git web--browse</i> does not work as expected because of quoting issues
 279                         with cmd.exe.
 280                         </p><p>
 281                         This is reducing my Git time budget to negative numbers, so much so that I
 282                         cannot even work on Git projects that I actually like, such as <i>jgit diff</i>
 283                         or <i>git rebase -i -p</i>, or at least projects I felt obliged to continue
 284                         to work on, such as <i>git notes</i>.
 285                         </p><p>
 286                         Now, some people who tried to teach me some time management strongly
 287                         criticized me for ignoring their lessons, and unfortunately, I have to agree.
 288                         </p><p>
 289                         The problem is that I would <u>hate</u> to see msysGit fall to the same state it
 290                         was after I stopped working on it last year.  I started it, and I would like
 291                         it to grow, but too few people took care of the issue tracker, too few tried
 292                         to debug their problems themselves, too few submitted fixes.
 293                         </p><p>
 294                         I note, though, that there is a positive trend.  But being the impatient person
 295                         I am ("2 seconds is my attention span") I tend to want the trend to be more
 296                         impressive.
 297                         </p><p>
 298                         Anyway, no work on msysGit for at least 4 days, that's what the doctor (me)
 299                         said...
 300                         </p>
 301                         <h6>Monday, 11th of May, Anno Domini MMIX, at the hour of the Rat</h6>
 302                         <a name=1241995759>
 303                         <h2>Working on jgit diff</h2>
 304
 305                         <p>
 306                         </p><p>
 307                         Shawn did so many useful things that I use on a daily basis that I felt really
 308                         awful when I realized just how <u>long</u> I had promised to clean up that diff
 309                         implementation I wrote for JGit.
 310                         </p><p>
 311                         Alas, it appears that the thing turned out to be almost a complete rewrite, as
 312                         the original implementation walked the edit graph in a rather inefficient way.
 313                         </p><p>
 314                         A little background: Myers' algorithm to generate "an edit script" works on
 315                         the <i>edit graph</i>: imagine you have all lines of file <i>A</i> as columns and
 316                         all lines of file <i>B</i> as rows, then the <i>edit graph</i> is a connection of
 317                         the upper left corner to the lower right corner, containing only horizontal,
 318                         vertical or diagonal elements, where diagonal elements are only allowed when
 319                         the lines of both files agree at that point:
 320                         </p><p>
 321 <pre>
 322  H E L L O , W O R L D
 323  ----
 324 L    \
 325       ---
 326 O        \
 327           ---
 328 W            \
 329               --------
 330 </pre>
 331                         </p><p>
 332                         The <i>shortest</i> edit path minimizes the number of non-diagonal elements.
 333                         </p><p>
 334                         Myers' idea is to develop forward and backward paths at the same time
 335                         (increasing the number of non-diagonal elements uniformly), storing
 336                         only the latest end points.  Once the paths meet, divide and conquer.
 337                         </p><p>
 338                         In theory, it would be quicker to store <u>all</u> end points and then just
 339                         reconstruct the shortest paths, alas, this takes way too much memory.
 340                         </p><p>
 341                         My first implementation did not remember start or end of the non-diagonal
 342                         parts, and had to recurse way more often than really necessary (in the end,
 343                         we will order the non-diagonal parts into horizontal and vertical parts
 344                         anyway, so start and end are sufficient).
 345                         </p><p>
 346                         The current progress can be seen <a href=http://repo.or.cz/w/egit/dscho.git/>
 347                         here</a>.
 348                         </p>
 349                         <h6>Friday, 17th of April, Anno Domini MMIX, at the hour of the Monkey</h6>
 350                         <a name=1239975597>
 351                         <h2>No time for Git</h2>
 352
 353                         <p>
 354                         </p><p>
 355                         It is a shame, but most of my Git time budget is taken by msysGit these
 356                         days.
 357                         </p><p>
 358                         But at least msysGit is moving again; I'll probably write a Herald about
 359                         it.
 360                         </p>
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