Re: best git practices, was Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued

On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 01:48 +0200, Jakub Narebski wrote:

This asymmetry is also part of what makes Git hard to learn at first.

There is a lot of new terminology to learn:

  refs
  remotes
  fast-forwarding
  rebasing
  origin
  master
  HEAD (which is not quite the same as good old CVS's HEAD)
  etc.

The solution is not, "have a good glossary" (which is needed, anyway), but to make the documentation introduce those concepts at the right time, instead of being chock-full of them from the beginning :)

Carl Worth's git-ification of the Mercurial book chapter is very nice in this regard; it doesn't dump all the terminology on you, but rather takes its time to introduce each concept when you are ready to know about it [1].

It's kind of sad that the first thing "man git-push" tells you is this:

       git-push - Update remote refs along with associated objects

So you go, "refs?  associated objects?  whaaaaaat?" :)

Imagine someone learning the GIMP a few versions ago. "I want to make this photo sharper". You go to the Filters/Enhance menu and you see

  Laplace
  Sobel
  Sharpen
  Unsharp mask

All of those sharpen the image.  Which one do you pick?

[1] http://cworth.org/hgbook-git/

  Federico