Re: [PATCH 1/2] Change old system name 'GIT' to 'Git'

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 20, 2013, 18:33 UTC
Message-ID: <7vehhfn1r0.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAJDDKr5_AWFF6MR2Kwt5FzA0vaSE-wx8xFO3xcRnKZ168hXBrg@mail.gmail.com>

David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> writes:

Show 23 quoted lines

> On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 1:59 AM, Thomas Ackermann <th.acker@arcor.de> wrote:
>> @@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ History Viewers
>>
>>     - *gitweb* (shipped with git-core)
>>
>> -   GITweb provides full-fledged web interface for GIT repositories.
>> +   GITweb provides full-fledged web interface for Git repositories.
>
> What about GITweb?
>
>> diff --git a/Documentation/git-update-ref.txt b/Documentation/git-update-ref.txt
>> index d377a35..0df13ff 100644
>> --- a/Documentation/git-update-ref.txt
>> +++ b/Documentation/git-update-ref.txt
>> @@ -73,7 +73,7 @@ in ref value.  Log lines are formatted as:
>>  Where "oldsha1" is the 40 character hexadecimal value previously
>>  stored in <ref>, "newsha1" is the 40 character hexadecimal value of
>>  <newvalue> and "committer" is the committer's name, email address
>> -and date in the standard GIT committer ident format.
>> +and date in the standard Git committer ident format.
>
> IMO some of these look nicer when everything is lowercase.
> e.g. "standard git committer ident format".

I do not think we ever intended to change the *name* of the software.

In the early days, we wrote GIT in places where, if we were doing a fancier typography, we would have used drop-caps for the latter two (i.e. it is "Git" spelled in a font whose lower case alphabets have the same shape as upper case ones but are smaller). So there were only "git" vs "Git".

If I were to decide today to change the spellings, with an explicit purpose of making things more consistent across documentation, it may make sense to use even a simpler rule that is less error-prone for people who write new sentences that has to have the word. How about treating it just like any other ordinary word? That is, we say "git" (without double-quotes, of course), unless it comes at the beginning of a sentence?