[svlug] Preventing a Revision Control Flamewar

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Brian J. Tarricone (bjt23 at cornell.edu):
> 
>> In a general sense, sure, but if you don't care about VCSs for the sake
>> of VCSs, might as well just pick whatever seems easiest and best suited
>> to the job and go with that.
> 
> A very short-sighted attitude, and I note that you similarly ignore my
> point about the reasons for favouring tools that enable major advances 
> (and thus are generally superior) even if you have no immediate need for
> the advantages.  You blandly observed that those long-term advances are
> irrelevant to Bill's usage case.   Oh well.

You seem to assume that doing extra work (in git's case, possibly a lot 
of extra work; its learning curve is quite steep compared to 
alternatives, and its documentation is some of the worst I've seen) to 
learn something you may never need always pays off.  Maybe it does, 
maybe it doesn't.  The tone of Bill's original email seemed to suggest 
(to me, anyway) that he was more concerned about completing his task 
than learning a new skill.  Perhaps I was mistaken.

I don't subscribe to the whole "knowledge for knowledge's sake" school 
of thinking.  Sometimes we just want to get things done, and sometimes 
being a little short-sighted is perfectly fine for mundane matters.

In any case, in a world where knowing how to use git is useful, knowing 
how to use svn is also useful.  Learning svn is potentially a productive 
use of one's time, and deferring learning git until one actually needs 
it (if the need ever actually arises, even) doesn't seem like such a big 
deal to me.

But anyway, this is potentially morphing into a philosophical argument 
that a) I have no interest in participating in, and b) is a bit 
off-topic for this list.

	-brian