Re: How do get a specific version of a particular file?

From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Feb 27, 2007, 22:39 UTC
Message-ID: <20070227223929.GA9027@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0702272053080.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 08:55:41PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> Since you seem to be no old-timer who cannot remember how she learnt about 
> certain Git concepts: What documentation did you read, an in which order? 
> This might help us making the parts likely to be seen by new users 
> better...

I started using Everyday git, and the git(7) man page, and the tutorials. I tried using some of the git manpages, but many of them were so inpenetrable that I would just skip over that bit and hope the rest of the man page would make sense or would just try searching somewhere for the information. To be honest, some of the best documentation was Linus's email messages on the git mailing list, especially the ones about git philosophy and examples about how to do things.

For example, the man page of git-rev-parse will give you a very dry description of ".." and "...", but absolutely no examples of when you would you might use one or the other. The only place where I learned about this was from some of Linus's e-mail messages, and even then I'm still a little shaky on when you might use '...'.

And I'm still not sure why

	git show v1.5.0..v1.5.0.1

doesn't throw an error, and why it prints what it does...

Show 9 quoted lines

> > As a suggestion, maybe we should be moving (or at least copying) things 
> > like the <object> identifier syntax from the git-rev-parse manpage 
> > (which is plumbing, right?) to the top-level git manpage?
> 
> My vote is for moving, and referencing (kind of mv && ln -s).
> 
> But that means that you have to explain in a really concise way that Git 
> repositories contain blob, tree, commit and tag objects. And what they 
> are.

Well, git(7) already has an extraordinary verbose description of glob, tree, commit, and tag options, so if we move the object id syntax to git(7) that wouldn't be a problem. :-)

						- Ted