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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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