[Numpy-discussion] DVCS at PyCon

David Cournapeau cournape at gmail.com
Sat Apr 11 06:38:42 EDT 2009


On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Gael Varoquaux
<gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 12:05:55PM +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Eric Firing <efiring at hawaii.edu> wrote:
>> No need to apologize, I think I used the work bashing inappropriately
>> - I just wanted to say that the only way to understand the differences
>> between the tools is to use them. Reading about them will only confuse
>> you in my own experience. For example, I tried git once a long time
>> ago (during an infamous discussion between git and bzr developers on
>> the bzr M), could not understand a thing about it, and did not
>> understand any point in it except speed. Then I was forced to use git
>> because of bzr-svn constant frustrations - and I ended up to really
>> like it.
>
>> At last scipy conference, I tried to "sell" git advantages to Stefan
>> (a long time bzr user as well), who was far from convinced from my
>> explanations and my ranting. Then later he used it and liked it. Of
>> course, the logical conclusion could be that I am just very bad at
>> explaining why I like git :)
>
> I am pretty convinced that git is an excellent tool, but it forces people
> to invest a fare amount of time to learn it. I struggle quite a lot to
> have people use _any_ VCS. I just whish they'd make a usability effort.
> They could. There are a lot of low hanging fruits. But they don't care.
> It is geeks programming for geeks, not for normal users, IMHO.

But that's a development tool. I think it is expected that people have
to somewhat learn something about it. I agree we should care about
barrier of entry - if there is no way to make Josef happy, for
example, that would be a really strong argument against git.

But at the risk of being obvious, we should also care about people who
work on numpy and scipy codebase on a quasi daily basis, no ?

cheers,

David



More information about the NumPy-Discussion mailing list