Re: What are branches?

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 20, 2009, 20:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20090420201606.GH25059@dpotapov.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0904202117010.6771@intel-tinevez-2-302>

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 09:19:10PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> 
> The purpose of my message was to make Git old-timers _aware_ of the 
> problems newbies have with our notion of branches.  And a wish to come up 
> with less confusing documentation.

Thank you for your attempt bringing attention to this problem, but I think anyone who remember their first steps with Git or have observed other people starting to use Git recently have noticed that already.

I will try quickly summarize my view of it:

- branches in Git are not fundamentally different than in other VCSes,
  and clearly correspond commonly used definition of this term.
  Obviously, every VCS has some difference in the way how it manages
  branches (which makes use of branches in some VCS much easier than in
  others).

- obviously, all newcomers have some ideas about branches based on their
  previous experience (whether it was another VCS or some books), but
  often they do not give much thought to branches before, because they
  rarely used them except two or three branches (like maint and master),
  and many have never merged branches.

- the graph shown by gitk may be very confusing for beginners, because
  they cannot see the branch line, in particular, of the master branch.

- I don't find documentation to be confusing, but it doesn't mean that it
  cannot be improved. Yet, based on my observation, most confusion are
  among those users who has shown less propensity to read documentation.

Dmitry