Re: Difficulties in advertising a new branch to git newbies

[Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>]

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On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:13:42 +0100, "Guilhem Bonnefille" wrote:
> If the user is not a developer and only interested in testing, what
> about a simple snapshot tarball?
> So, you prepare the fix and then you pack everything in a
> myapp-timestamp.tar.gz and send this tarball to the user.

That's bad for all the same reasons we don't send tarballs around to
each other.

But here are several concrete points:

1. I want to be able to easily publicize a new branch with
   instructions that anyone can use, (regardless of git experience).

2. I've got the stuff available in a git branch already, and I don't
   want to do any more work.

3. I want the exchange to be as efficient as possible, (I might send
   multiple fixes in series to the user and it'd be really nice to
   take advantage of git's efficiency here).

4. I don't want to condemn the user to never being able to learn
   git. If I make this easy for the user then I get a nice lead-in to
   teach the user new things, (which is good for me since it helps me
   if the user starts sending me git commits rather than random
   patches without commit messages connected to who-knows-what
   tar-file version of the software, etc.)

etc. etc.

-Carl

PS. All that being said, our project does publish periodic tar-file
snapshots. But that's really for a different situation: specifically,
for people with whom I'm not already engaged in any conversation at
all.

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