Re: IETF Git and GitHub tutorial

[Sarah Banks <[e-mail]>]

Slightly soapboxish...

If we were all engineers writing code as a day job perhaps this would be second nature (or we'd be motivated to not admit we didn't know and we'd figure it out). But we're not all engineers, and git is unfortunately a tool for engineers. It's not as approachable as it seems some of us think it is. Thanks for supporting the effort; I do hope documentation solves the problem :)

/S

> On Oct 11, 2019, at 11:49 AM, Warren Kumari <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 6:13 PM Sarah Banks <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>> My WG has a lot of first timers. And a lot of non engineers - technical folks, SQA for example, but non engineers. FWIW everything Rich just said would be over their heads, in that they don't check in/check out code on a daily basis. I strongly +1 a thorough walk through guide for the typical tasks.
> 
> 
> I don’t see the complexity -- as (possibly) Bruce Lawson said "Git
> gets easier once you understand branches are homeomorphic endofunctors
> mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space."
> 
> W
> 
> P.S: I *fully* agree with you -- I do basically all of my personal
> projects in git, and all of my drafts, and I contribute to other
> people projects, etc -- and I *still* often just copy my changes
> somewhere, delete the entire repo, checkout a clean copy and then
> stuff my changes back in, all the while chanting the mantra "nom erg
> con flit, nom erg con flit, please gods, nom erg con flit". (Ok, it's
> been many years since I'be blown away a repo, but I *do* still have a
> personal cheatsheet for how to rebase a pull request...)
> 
> I've tried explaining to some "non-computer" people how to use git,
> and their eyes quicky glazed over -- for some of them the closest I've
> gotten is "Use Github, click the button that looks like a pencil, type
> quickly and then click 'Commit changes'. Don't touch anything else..."
> 
> W
> 
> 
>> 
>> Thanks
>> Sarah
>> 
>> 
>>> On Oct 11, 2019, at 9:00 AM, Salz, Rich <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>>  And there is a serious limitation, which is that it pretty much impossible to
>>>   rebase with only the web interface, so after having submitted an edit, once
>>>   it is accepted, one winds up with a tree (fork) you can not use again.
>>> 
>>> The work-around is simple and probably follows what most people do, anyway: do not re-use a branch name for different items of work. (Arguably that's an implied git best practice.) In fact, GitHub pull requests use the branch name, so I would not be surprised if doing this (which you shouldn't) can lead to problems anyway.
>>> 
>>