My experience is that in a workshop, people become actually interested
in git when they pair up and start collaborating and working on the same
project *at the same time*.
I would say that this is the biggest strenght of Git versus SVN.
SVN is just fine if you are working alone, or if you are not working at
the same time as others in your group. But once you start getting
conflicts, this is where Git starts shinning.
A good approach might be to start with the Github web UI rather than
with git commands, and then go down to the commands. The question is, is
it possible to teach the concepts of push/pull/merge before the
concepts of add/commit ?
I'm not sure it is.
Maxime
Le 2016-03-01 08:23, Greg Wilson a écrit :
Re-reading Arjun Raj's post
(http://rajlaboratory.blogspot.ca/2016/02/from-reproducibility-to-over.html),
I've got a couple of thoughts. First, I think some of the disparaging
comments on Twitter and elsewhere were unhelpful: they're unlikely to
get the author to change his mind, and it discourages other people
from talking about what they do.
Second, we all make the same decision he does most of the time. For
example, people tell me I'd be more productive if I used Haskell
instead of Python, or the Atom editor, or Slack, or blah blah blah. In
almost every case, I compare the time I have to make the change, the
time it'll take for the change to pay off, and the likelihood of the
technology's fans being right about the benefits, and decide "nope" -
and I'm willing to bet you do too. I'm probably wrong in some cases,
but with so many new things flying around, I can't be certain which
ones, and hey, deadlines...
So here are my questions:
1. What's LD50 [1] for version control, i.e., how long would people
have to use it (or watch someone else use) for half of them to be
convinced it's worth adopting? I think LD50 for the Unix shell is
less than an hour, because that's how long it takes us to introduce
pipes and loops, which most workshop participants find compelling. At
what point do at least half of workshop participants find Git
compelling enough to actually adopt it?
2. What should we say to someone like Arjun? It's clear from his post
that he knows the arguments in favor of version control, and has
actually tried it. It's also clear that he cares about doing things
well - what can we do to convince someone like that?
Thanks,
Greg
[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/LD50
--
---------------------------------
Maxime Boissonneault
Analyste de calcul - Calcul Québec, Université Laval
Président - Comité de coordination du soutien à la recherche de Calcul Québec
Team lead - Research Support National Team, Compute Canada
Instructeur Software Carpentry
Ph. D. en physique
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