Thankfully, github has zero control over git. If they did have control they would have sank the whole operation on year one
> because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command.
How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does.
And this is exactly where disconnects happen, and where you need telemetry or something like it to tell you how your users actually use the system, rather than imagining how they should.
A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file".
A novice thinks "I want to restore this file to the state it had before I touched it".
Now we can argue about whether "restore" is the ideal word here, but all the same, end users tend to think it terms of "I want to undo what I did", and not in terms of git internals.
So a hypothetical git with telemetry would probably show people repeatedly trying "git restore", "git undo", "git revert", etc, trying to find an undo command.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the user base who are by design all technical, and the use case that this tool serves: deeply technical and specific actions to a codebase.
Git is not just software. It is also a vernacular about how to reason about code change. You can't just make arbitrary commands do magic stuff by default and then expect that vernacular to be as strong as it is today.
Those "ergonomics" you're asking for already existed in other tools like CVS and subversion, they are specifically why those tools sucked and why git was created.
CVS and Subversion have nothing to do with this, they were extremely different to Git in the way they worked and lost for many reasons that have nothing to do with having command names understandable to normal people.
Surely, telemetry should help educate the tool maker to reveal the underlying model rather than coercing the model to reflect a bastardized worldview (as restore seems to).
Trying to wedge git into workflows that don't operate around git seems like a fool's errand. Either we must build tools around the workflow, or we must build the workflow around the tool.
This is part of why I find jujustsu so unintuitive: there is no clear model it's built around, only some sense of how to work with files I apparently lack. But perhaps it is the perfect tool for some workflow I have not yet grasped!
“a novice thinks”
Just learn your damn tools and stop whining.
For a dedicated "restore" it's worth it to me... (who will not maintain it)
These two commands operate on the same level of abstraction. And they should be equally powerful, which means that whichever you choose to learn will be able to serve all of your restore-content needs. That's what I mean.
Of course there is always the pedagogic cost of having two similar commands.