Subsurface User GUI access to read-only cloud git repository

[Willem Ferguson]

On 2021/01/17 18:38, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
> Willem,
>
> As the person who looks at user repos most often, let me tell you that 
> they are DECIDEDLY not linear. And that in 90+% of the cases it is 
> merges that are causing the issues. And undoing a merge the wrong way 
> can make the whole situation far worse. And we know from experience 
> that nothing is ever the users’ fault. So giving them a tool to REALLY 
> mess things up will be seen as “Subsurface sucks”. Not as “Subsurface 
> is amazing, it gave me this powerful tool, but I didn’t understand 
> enough about it to use it and made things worse”
>
> git is powerful and complicated. As you have noticed yourself in your 
> pull requests. Its behavior is not at all intuitive to someone who is 
> used to linear or hierarchical systems.
> You may remember that we briefly played with exactly this idea of 
> stepping through the git hierarchy before settling on the current undo 
> implementation - and the reason we did that is because the moment we 
> encourage people to mess with the git repo they WILL permanently lose 
> data.
>
> I’d much rather get the occasional requests to undo things in the 
> backend (currently I average fewer than one a week - most likely 
> because a lot of people aren’t diving). But even if it is one a day, 
> that’s still far less aggravating than having to tell people “sorry, 
> you messed up the data”.
>
> We have a full undo system. Your earlier email clearly shows that you 
> didn’t realize that was available on mobile - maybe we need a tutorial 
> mode that exposes that to users so they are aware of its existence.
>
> Yes, that no longer works once you quit the app. When you do that, 
> just drop me a line and I’ll do my best to fix the error.
>
> /D

Thank you for your time with this. A full undo stack is miles more 
powerful than the simple solution I proposed.

Kind regards,

wf



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