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From: Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2025 22:55:00 -0300
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D <nospam@example.net> writes:

> On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
>
>>> This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
>>> goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
>>> binary and how it works for my own personal use case.
>>
>> I went fossil when I had to teach a class.  I thought git was more
>> complicated than fossil.  But it turns out that fossil was seen as
>> crazily complicated by nearly all students (anyway).  I think fossil is
>> just fine, though I confess I prefer the file system over a database.
>
> This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
> complicated compared with git?

Not compared to git.  They did not get to see git.  They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.

I don't have much information.  The command line seemed an awful
experience to them.  I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.

This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for real-world,
pratical experience, but they're not up to an introduction to the tools
used in the real-world.

> I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day,
> regardless of if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple
> commands to get started at the basic level (we were not discussing
> rebasing and huge software projects).

I think it boils down to a lot more because these are compouter users
that even ``environment variable'' is a never-seen concept.  I watched
them opening a c:\> prompt on their Windows system, slowlying typing up
their very long path to their project, say, and then doing it again on
the next class---paths with spaces and other complicated symbols.