Re: Hyphens and hiding core commands

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Nov 28, 2006, 00:42 UTC
Message-ID: <7vy7pwcsgp.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <87ac2cwha4.wl%cworth@cworth.org>

Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Yes, there is a learning curve. There's the "once you grok the index"
> stuff you just mentioned. And it's really backwards to have to teach
> people that the "basic" way to do something is with a command line
> that looks more complex, ("commit -a"), and that "once you learn more
> you'll understand what that -a is all about and you'll know when not
> to use it".

I think you are teaching backwards.  Couldn't you start like this?

	"git commit" takes the list of paths you want to commit.
	Editing hello.c and saying "git commit hello.c" would
	commit your changes to hello.c.  It is cumbersome to
	list everything when your edit is all over the place,
	and in such a case you can say "git commit -a" to mean
	"everything I changed".

Later you can enhance that experience by teaching them index, saying:

	You might want to tell git that your change to this file
	is more or less complete, even when you are not ready to
	commit the whole thing.  You could use update-index to
	mark them and then later say "git commit" will make a
	commit from the state you used update-index on, without
	having you list them on the command line.  When you do
	this, the commit template would list three classes of
	files and here are what they mean...