Re: understanding how remote tracking works

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 9, 2010, 19:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7vaaov60rv.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20100809021900.GA10596@burratino>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Michael Witten wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 20:53, Geoff Russell <geoffrey.russell@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> I'm working my way through Jon Loeliger's Git book and it's
>>> confusing when the actual behaviour differs from that in the book
>>
>> This probably results from the git culture's conflation (or should I
>> say confusion?) of low-level and high-level representations and
>> commands.
>
> I guess I’ll bite.  What does that mean?  We have “show-ref” and
> “update-ref” precisely as low-level commands that are independent
> of representation.

I tend to agree with Michael (modulo s/ culture/'s early&/) here. Many documents written in the early days, the "tutorial" document by Linus being the most prominent example, were written in a way to focus exposing the implementation details to show how simple the structure is. These documents and tips by early adopters, simply by virtue of being old, are found more easily by search engines. Later we started encouraging use of show-ref and update-ref to isolate users from the implementation details that can be changed for performance reasons.

> Probably the more relevant question: what do you want to do about it?

Continue the current course of encouraging the use of plumbing commands and not looking at the low-level implementation detail. Perhaps help people update their documents, moving stale descriptions into "historical note" sections.