Simplify gitless documentation and suggestions for future articles

[wooooooooooooooowastaken]

I'm a non-developer who decided to try Gitless after reading Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git.[1] Gitless is described in the article as providing a simplifed version control experience. I have a basic understanding of command-line and have been able to install nearly everything that I've tried, however I could not install Gitless on Windows 10 despite following the directions exactly. I had the same issue described in Closed Issue #13 in this post May 2017 by @metya. I'm hoping to work out the issue in that thread.

The purpose of this post is to offer a suggestion-- Please specify the target audience more clearly in the documentation and in future articles that may be published on the software. The article does imply GItless is intended for those with a computer science background , but it also suggests it #is designed for general users performing common tasks:

External validity. The user study was conducted on only 11 people that are, or have previously been, affiliated with computer science at MIT and may not generalize to Git users in general. To mitigate this factor Gitless is available online for free, and anyone can download and try the tool. Our findings may not generalize to real-world usage if the tasks that occur in the wild are significantly different from the ones in our experiment. The fact that we have been using Gitless for over a year now and haven’t encountered any big limitations mitigates this concern. But there may be Git usage patterns that are not well supported by Gitless, especially those that use features such as stashing for special purposes.

Presumably, both the cases studied in the article and users in the wild must install the software; it is currently not possible to install gitless on windows by following the directions verbatim. Clarifying the installation documentation or modifying the software to better support windows would offer better generalizability of the findings in the article.

[Use case example: Multiple technically-savvy non-developers who want a simplified version control system to facilitate working on a prose article whose working-copy is stored in an online repository.]

1. De Rosso SP, Jackson D. Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications. OOPSLA 2016. New York, NY, USA: ACM; 2016:292–310. doi:10.1145/2983990.2984018

[spderosso]

Thank you for your feedback (and for reading the paper!). We have binary releases for Linux and Mac OS so that installing Gitless on those platforms is easy but we don't have the same for Windows yet. Hopefully we'll have binary releases for Windows in the future but this requires a non-trivial amount of work.

[dwaal]

gl init https://github.com/spderosso/experiment

Fails: repo does not exist. This is from the docu on the main page: http://gitless.com

Odd.