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Re: Did anyone have trouble learning the idea of local vs. remote branches?

From
Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
Date
Nov 8, 2006, 12:17 UTC
Message-ID
<4551CAF7.3050008@op5.se>
In-Reply-To
<vpqbqnisegc.fsf@ecrins.imag.fr>
Matthieu Moy wrote:
Show 10 quoted lines
> Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> writes:
> 
>> Today I was talking with someone that I collaborate with through
>> Git and they still seemed to not get the idea that all branches
>> in their repository are local, and that at least a 'git fetch'
>> is needed to update the local tracking branches to the version
>> in the central repository that we collaborate through.  And this
>> isn't the first time we've had such discussions.
> 
> To me, the biggest difficulty was to understand the vocubulary.

I had that same problem, although I started with git and came from CVS / SVN. I am sufficiently experienced with those two system to hope that I wouldn't come across any similarities at all, so I wasn't expecting any, so I didn't get too badly bitten.

The Documentation/glossary.txt file is a very good place to start reading, although I wouldn't object to it being re-arranged to have the terms described there pop up "in order of appearance", so to speak. I sent in a couple of patches to the glossary file whenever I encountered something in gittish that I didn't understand. Sometimes I had managed to guess the correct meaning and the patch got applied. In other cases I had it completely wrong and other, more gittish-fluent, people corrected the patches and amended the documentation that led to the confusion.

I think this is the only way to keep the docs alive and newcomer-friendly. Sadly, neither the maintainer nor the active contributors have newbie-eyes so we're relying on everyone who *are* new to git to help keep git easy for new people.

> And the git Vs cogito increased the confusion.
>

I've found that too. It's a shame that some things can be done with git that isn't possible (or at least easy) with cogito and the other way around. The shared but divergent terminology doesn't exactly help either. Now I fear it's too late to do anything about it.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Previous: Matthieu MoyNext: Wink Saville
Message 5 of 9 in “Did anyone have trouble learning the idea of local vs. remote branches?”
  1. Shawn PearceNov 7, 2006
  2. Salikh ZakirovNov 7, 2006
  3. Shawn PearceNov 8, 2006
  4. Matthieu MoyNov 8, 2006
  5. Andreas EricssonNov 8, 2006
  6. Wink SavilleNov 8, 2006
  7. Jakub NarebskiNov 8, 2006
  8. Wink SavilleNov 8, 2006
  9. Jakub NarebskiNov 8, 2006

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