Re: help: bisect single file from repos

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de>
Date: Dec 9, 2009, 01:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20091209012855.GA3208@neumann>
In-Reply-To: <7vein5e2lc.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 10:35:11AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> But I wonder if there is
> something we _could_ have done better in the documentation area to avoid
> this from the beginning, iow, make it easier to "learn how things work
> before using"?  I think there is a lesson to be learned by us in here, and
> I'd like to hear comments and improvement suggestions, especially from
> "usability" and "friendly to new people" advocates.

when a git command accepts a commit as command line option, the documentation usually refers to the "Specifying revisions" section of 'git rev-parse's docs for "a more complete list of ways to spell commits"[1]. Even the docs of porcelain commands and the user manual do that. But 'git rev-parse' is plumbing, and we actively advertise that avarage users don't really need to know about plumbing at all. While new to git I repeatedly encountered this reference to 'git rev-parse' all over the porcelain manpages, and it was a real burden for me back then. I was like "but I don't want to know about all the glory details, just give me a short summary".

I think the user should not refer to plumbing manpages to be able to use porcelain commands. Therefore, the manpage of every command accepting a commit option need to have a section about specifying these commits. This section doesn't need to be as detailed as 'git rev-parse'; perhaps we don't need to discuss the ^{} notation there. Also, the precedence in case of an ambiguous symbolic ref name should be described without reference to the internal $GIT_DIR/refs/ directory structure.

Furthermore, some manpages use the term "<commit>", while others "<committish>" or "<rev>". The same term should be used everywhere.

Best, Gábor

[1] - 'git cherry-pick' doc says the following:

  <commit>
    Commit to cherry-pick. For a more complete list of ways to spell
    commits, see the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in git-rev-parse(1).

What? "A _more_ complete list"!? Well, it's not very hard to be more complete than this, there is not a single way described here (;