Re: de-alphabetizing the documentation

From: Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Jul 7, 2018, 04:25 UTC
Message-ID: <20180707042534.GC3546@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <20180706232147.GF6343@ofb.net>

On Fri, Jul 06, 2018 at 04:21:47PM -0700, frederik@ofb.net wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> I don't think that it's really important to find a "best" ordering for
> commands or glossary terms; it's more a matter of finding someone who
> is willing to take responsibility for choosing a reasonable ordering.
> Presumably the head maintainer of this project could delegate the task
> to a qualified volunteer, not a newbie like myself but not necessarily
> someone with expert knowledge either. It's too bad that a policy of
> not listing things alphabetically wasn't adopted from the beginning of
> this project, but I guess that's life.

That wasn't that portion of the man page, for better or for worse. We can debate whethher using a non-alphabetical order would be better or worse for everyone; personally, I think the much better pointer is at the very beginning of the git man page, which points people at "man gittutorial" and "man giteveryday".

It seems to me that for your stated goal, "git everyday" has a good list of commands that people should learn, complete with a proposed workflow.

That's probably the biggest stumbling block of finding an ideal ordering. What's reasonable really depends on your workflow, and there are many different workflows depending on what a particular developer is trying to do. Consider carpentry; for some use cases, a screwdriver is an absolutely critical tool. For others, they might never use it, and instead almost exclusively join two pieces of woods using mortise and tenon joint. Others might use a butt joint, plus glue and nails. All of these different techniques can be used to make a wooden box, and they all involve a very different set of tools.

Regards,

					- Ted