It's hilarious how difficult it is to get a non-programmer on Windows setup on Bitbucket (to clone a repo and then push a commit).
I don't blame this on Bitbucket, I blame the state of Windows Git applications.
My friend who is an artist (pretty technical too but he's not a programmer and never deals with SSH) is going to do some art for me for a game project I have in Bitbucket. I added him to my repo and told him to download Gitextensions, which seems to be, arguably, the best free graphical git app for Windows.
So, he downloaded it and set it up but when he started it up for the first time there was no option to clone from a source URL other than from Github.
First you have to figure out that you need to setup your SSH key and then clone the SSH url. I know that, but a non-programmer with no experience using git before would probably have zero clue.
You have to then setup your SSH key using Putty, and I'm sure we all know how awesome it is that SSH keys generated with Putty are in a different format than SSH keys generated with ssh-keygen, so pasting your public key into the Bitbucket site leads to nothing but problems. You have to erase some stuff, add "ssh-rsa" to the front, remove the newlines, etc. You can't just copy and paste the whole thing. If you aren't experienced with SSH keys you will not be able to figure it out. The bitbucket docs for this step assume you have an SSH key generated from ssh-keygen and not from putty, so they are of no help.
Once you get your ssh key straightened out then it's not too bad.
In short, it sucks. If Bitbucket wants to capture people other than programmers they need a better Windows app. For this reason alone I would be tempted to use Github instead since they have a dedicated Windows app.
Gitextensions is open source too so they it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to just add support for Bitbucket just like they have for Github.
I've used SmartGit for Windows too but I'm not a fan of their products and I was looking for something free.
Does anyone have suggestions for getting non-programmers setup on Windows?
I'm pretty sure you can use GitHub's Windows app for BitBucket Git repositories. I've pointed it to non-GitHub repositories at work in the past. You should look into it for your friend.
I don't blame this on Bitbucket, I blame the state of Windows Git applications.
My friend who is an artist (pretty technical too but he's not a programmer and never deals with SSH) is going to do some art for me for a game project I have in Bitbucket. I added him to my repo and told him to download Gitextensions, which seems to be, arguably, the best free graphical git app for Windows.
So, he downloaded it and set it up but when he started it up for the first time there was no option to clone from a source URL other than from Github.
First you have to figure out that you need to setup your SSH key and then clone the SSH url. I know that, but a non-programmer with no experience using git before would probably have zero clue.
You have to then setup your SSH key using Putty, and I'm sure we all know how awesome it is that SSH keys generated with Putty are in a different format than SSH keys generated with ssh-keygen, so pasting your public key into the Bitbucket site leads to nothing but problems. You have to erase some stuff, add "ssh-rsa" to the front, remove the newlines, etc. You can't just copy and paste the whole thing. If you aren't experienced with SSH keys you will not be able to figure it out. The bitbucket docs for this step assume you have an SSH key generated from ssh-keygen and not from putty, so they are of no help.
Once you get your ssh key straightened out then it's not too bad.
In short, it sucks. If Bitbucket wants to capture people other than programmers they need a better Windows app. For this reason alone I would be tempted to use Github instead since they have a dedicated Windows app.
Gitextensions is open source too so they it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to just add support for Bitbucket just like they have for Github.
I've used SmartGit for Windows too but I'm not a fan of their products and I was looking for something free.
Does anyone have suggestions for getting non-programmers setup on Windows?