On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 02:59:43PM +0200, Jari Aalto wrote: > > I use HEAD~1 always, because I think the consistency in learning the > most important factor. People may have different preferences and there is nothing wrong with that. However, imposing a single style on everyone is *wrong*. What you propose is to hide a legitimate syntax on the ground that you do not use it, and I don't think that is a good enough reason. > It does not matter what advanced users use. The documentation should > primarily focus the newcomers. Wrong... and wrong again. First, this documentation is intended for all users. It is not "SVN Crash Course" or something like that intended for newcomers. Second, there is nothing wrong with having more than one way to express the same thing, and newcomers should be aware of that even if they prefer to use HEAD~1 all the time. If you don't tell them that, they may be confused when encounter it later, and they will encounter it sooner or later, because many of us use this ^-syntax. > Those used to git may prefer ^, but it does not follow that others > necessarily do so and that that should be the "proper learning path". It seems to me that your "proper learning path" is based solely on what you prefer, and not everyone shares your preferences here. In fact, ^-syntax is very natural to specify the _previous_ commit. Have you notice we usually say "previous", not "one commit before"? > People usually migrate to git from other VCSs, which have very > consistent UI - There are no alternatives > > -r1:10 Subversion > -r1..19 Bzr > ...etc First of all, this comparison is incorrect, because SVN uses fixed numbers, which does not change over time. The true equivalent of that numbers in Git is SHA-1. ~N-syntax is *alternative*, which is useful when you think in relative terms, and it is rarely used with for large N. Second, deficiency of other SCMs is not a good enough reason for Git to impose the same restriction on its users. Besides, I don't know about Bzr, but SVN CLI is insane. If you need to do something simple, like compare your working directory with some tag, you end up typing: $ svn diff --old=A_VERY_LONG_URL/tags/tagname --new=. with Git you can do that as simple as $ git diff tagname Before SVN 1.4, there was no option to show the change made by some revision, so you had to type: svn diff -r PREV_REV:REV. One would think that after they added '-c' in SVN 1.4, no one needs to do that manually, but this option does not work in one of most common case: $ svn diff -c HEAD svn: Non-numeric change argument given to -c so you need to figure out what is the number of the HEAD manually, and only then you can use 'svn diff -c'. With git, you can do that easily: $ git show Also, using 'svn switch' to switch between branches is slow and painful as hell. First, you have to type A_VERY_LONG_URL and if you happen to forgot to check in some changes, you end up with completely mess in your working directory. 'git checkout' has much more consistent behavior, and it does not destroy your work... So, IMNSHO, recent versions of Git is way easier to use than SVN even in those cases where SVN provides similar functionality... Dmitry - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
