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I get really sick of this attitude.

None of us want to understand every single domain of knowledge from set theory or quantum physics up to cosmology or social psychology.

I personally have been forced to learn more low-level Unixy things than I ever wanted to. I want to write simple and elegant front and back end code quickly so I can spend my spare time honing UX and other human-facing aspects of my work.

I resent being flamed because I don't fully understand the subtleties of zsh or nginx or or whatever other shiny toy someone else happens to find essential knowledge. Your world might not necessarily be mine.

> None of us want to understand every single domain of knowledge from set theory or quantum physics up to cosmology or social psychology.

Speak for yourself. All of those are fascinating.

Speak for yourself. They are fascinating for you, but not for me or many other people.

Actually. I agree with you (apart from the fact that I haven't had a chance to learn much about social psychology). I was just trying to think of examples of disciplines at opposite ends of an imagined continuum.

You might be right about any number of such subtleties, but you are not right about this. There is no way that spending half an hour to learn how public-key authentication works is a bad investment for any person working on an application that communicates with something over a network.

You can't follow 3 step-by-step instructions, insult me by implying I'm flaming and then drudge up completely unrelated tools in a discussion about ssh-keygen?

What do you people want? Seriously? Yes, I'd love to have a big red easy button. It could autoconfigure MySQL, and write init scripts, configure deploy environments because apache conf files are too complicated to learn. Hell, it could even write my backend code and then commit it for me too!

I'm done with this ludicrous conversation. I've never seen such an ignorant-excusing entitled discussion in a "technical" community before. Downvote me because you can't follow steps or can't be bothered to learn how to use one of your most important development tools, I've lost interest.

I apologise. My comment was only modestly related to it's context. I've been suffering from a bit of *nix-fatigue at the moment and I wanted to vent.

From looking at the desktops of an ordinary office, it may be difficult to realize that, when you are talking about internet connected servers, it's a very *nix world.

One of the reasons why I recommend using Linux on the desktop if you develop software for anything non-Windows: it's handy to have more exposure to the environment your code will run on. If you run Eclipse to develop Java code that'll run under Tomcat on Linux, you have a lot to gain by moving to Linux yourself.

If, for some reason, I end up writing Windows-specific code once again, I'll probably develop it on a Windows box. Visual Studio is a great IDE if you want to write programs for Windows.

Nobody in this thread implied that you are flaming, nor intended to insult you; the person you are responding to is not the person you originally responded to, and he is commenting about people in other threads flaming him. I resent having to explain this to you.

What the hell are you so angry about, seriously? People have less expertise than you, and that makes you upset?

He's probably angry because he's had a person with 15 years experience unstage 10 commits already pushed to origin (reset HEAD~10) then readd them to the index and complain to everyone that git tells him every file in his repo is conflicting after a merge. After a serious bout of ROFL he has to help the coworker use merge correctly weekly. After a while of this the person decides to manually fix the conflicts each time he has to push to origin there adding a comment in the git log that says :merged master back into branch.

So to all of you that actually know the difference between merge and rebase and what the difference between origin and local branches are :hattip:

>I resent being flamed because I don't fully understand the subtleties of zsh or nginx or or whatever other shiny toy someone else happens to find essential knowledge. Your world might not necessarily be mine.

That was in the post I replied to. It's insulting because it's accusing me of things that I didn't do. I merely am just a bit floored by the notion that following these instructions, http://help.github.com/win-set-up-git/, is asking too much of someone who is going to be using Git regularly.

I guess I expect too much and seem to be wasting my energy. I apologize.

I'll repeat this: he was saying other people flame him in those situations, not you.

I apologize for my confusion.

For many people there Github = git, so saying github isn't much harder to set up than Git isn't saying much.

Using git on Windows has historically not been super fun. The CLI installer mostly works, but it's pretty clunky. Cygwin works fine too, but it's also not especially elegant. At the very least, known of these solutions conform to the expectations of people of the platform. The GUI clients on Windows last I looked (a year ago) were pretty terrible, especially compared to TortoiseSVN, which isn't bad. OS X, on the other hand, had several very nice GUI clients even before the official Github client came out.

> The GUI clients on Windows last I looked (a year ago) were pretty terrible, especially compared to TortoiseSVN, which isn't bad

There is TortoiseGit, which is basically TortoiseSVN over git. It looks much the same.

You can regard it as a good place to start with git, or as something that stops you learning what makes git special.

Maybe it's gotten better, but last I tried it, TortoiseGit simply did not work well. It was buggy and awkward. It crashed. And I agree with what I think you're saying in that it obscures a lot of what makes Git different. (That said, I still think it would be very useful if it worked well.)

I don't know what difference the "Github = git" distinction makes, from an oAuth perspective it still seems implicitly obvious to me that completing the signup and adding SSH keys are distinct tasks.

As for "CLI installer" (I presume you mean the installer for the CLI git client), and Cygwin, I'm not sure what to say. I've used the Git installer dozens of times without problem, there aren't exactly tons of places for it to go wrong. Are there specific or particular issues you have with it?

I do indeed forget that some programmers manage to make it far resisting learning to use the command line. Even with step-by-step instructions. I guess at some people I'm willing to fault the developer rather than tools that are powerful that come with good documentation.

Essentially what you're saying is that you understand it; therefore it's simple to understand.

Obviously GitHub believe there are people who will benefit from using Git who can't be bothered understanding setting up ssh.

Seems reasonable to me.

I think you're right and I guess that's what I'm beginning to realize. I just kind of assumed that in that case... Git is the wrong tool for their job. If you don't need the "power of Git" (I swear, I'm not in love with Git), then use Dropbox or SVN or something simpler. Seems easier than fighting with keys, and then fighting with git's distributed nature and then fighting with all of the complexities of merging and conflicts.

Haha, maybe another of way of putting things from my perspective, I found keys to be the least of my concerns once I got into projects that really used Git and I have a hard time seeing people be successful with Git if the keygen steps throws them off.

I hope that explains things from a different perspective :)

I'm sure you'd love to still be programming in assembly, but some of us prefer to spend our time actually, you know, not mucking around with stuff that is an utter waste of our time.

It takes less than 4 minutes to do. And way to ignore every, other, thing I mention in there, like how something else is probably better suited for your needs if you think it is an "utter waste of time".

The level of discourse and use the downvote just amazes me anymore. Seriously, how can you be that much of a douche after I made very basic, undisputed points?

What I don't get is why some people are so against making things simpler to get started with.

So what if it takes 4 minutes? Why not save all the people who might use your tool 4 minutes of clicking 'OK' through a half dozen boxes you assure them they should just ignore? Particularly if github (as seems clear) want to get more people to pay them money.

> "Scary crypto stuff"? So you don't understand how PKI works and you're trying to use distributed source control?

Is this an honest question, or are you alluding to the idea that someone who doesn't understand PKI should not use distributed source control?

Well, in the original quote that was cited from "scary crypto stuff" was surrounded with:

Last I checked they[GitHub] made you perform a bunch of scary crypto stuff on your local machine before they'd let you in.

If performing `ssh-keygen` and entering in an (optional) password from a command line constitutes "scary crypto", then maybe Git and GitHub isn't for everyone. Not that anyone needs to know how PKI works, but they might be better off knowing that `ssh-keygen` generates an ssh key pair, a pretty essential component of the `git` workflow.

Maybe that's why SVN is so strong in older development shops. Outside of the effort required to convert an SVN repo to a Git repo, all those developers already have all the tools necessary on their machines (Windows is high on that list) and in many cases inside a VPN like my division we just use WebDAV anyways, completely bypassing the need for SSH Keys in favor of ActiveDirectory.

PKI has nothing to do with SSH keys. Github's use of SSH does not use certificates, and github has no certification infrastructure.

My apologies, I abuse "PKI" to mean "PK infrastructure" (which I know is what the acronym stands for, I'm making a bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary), I think it's silly that PKI implicitly means CAs but according to Wikipedia at least, you're correct.

No, he isn't, and the relevant Wikipedia article is very poorly written. PKI is a highly generic term. Webs of trust are just as much a PKI as a certificate-based system.

Everything you've said in this thread has been bang-on, and the replies you're getting are deeply depressing.

Can we at least agree that if we attempted a list of all the Xs a programmer needs to know before doing Y and made it law that nobody could write any software at all?

Understanding key pairs is very basic knowledge. I don't expect people to understand everything, but things like this, I do. It's dangerous not to.