From: Federico Mena Quintero <federico@novell.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:16:04 GMT
Subject: Re: best git practices, was Re: Git User's Survey 2007 unfinished summary continued
Message-ID: <1193328964.4522.361.camel@cacharro.xalalinux.org>
In-Reply-To: <8fe92b430710241648j609d4d00x121836001a69d1e6@mail.gmail.com>

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

> git push is opposite (almost) to git fetch, not to git pull.

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