Re: Git Documentation

From: Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 22, 2008, 15:47 UTC
Message-ID: <76718490807220847i298f256bm4c3f85bfde079ee2@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0807221335560.3391@eeepc-johanness>

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 7:40 AM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

> Most people hate to know the internals.  They buy the car, and never want
> to look inside the motor compartment.  They buy wine, and never want to
> know how it is made.  They buy an iPod and never want to know who
> assembles it, and how, and in what environment.

I agree with this. And I like the top-down approach. Nonetheless, I think there are a few git concepts that are important to understand. Specifically, I don't think you can use git without understanding the index.

Unfortunately, git isn't quite as good about abstractions yet as some of the items you make analogies to. And even car's leak:

   "And you can't drive as fast when it's raining, even though your
   car has windshield wipers and headlights and a roof and a heater,
   all of which protect you from caring about the fact that it's
   raining (they abstract away the weather), but lo, you have to
   worry about hydroplaning (or aquaplaning in England) and
   sometimes the rain is so strong you can't see very far ahead so
   you go slower in the rain, because the weather can never be
   completely abstracted away, because of the law of leaky
   abstractions."

   http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

:-)

j.