Re: [PATCH 5/6] Documentation/git-merge.txt: improve short description in DESCRIPTION

> Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>>> Last, if "reference" is not good enough and we get to internals anyway,
>>>> why not say SHA1 then?
>>>
>>> Because that is still colloquial? I think s/name/object name/ is a
>>> sensible change, but not s/name/reference/.
>>
>> No, "reference" is more sensible here than any of "name", "object name",
>> or "SHA-1", the same way as here:
>>
>> $ git help glossary
>> [...]
>> chain
>>         A list of objects, where each object in the list contains a
>>         reference to its successor (for example, the successor of a
>>         commit could be one of its parents).
>> [...]
>
> The entry for "chain" and the description under discussion have
> stress on different aspect, though.  The description of "chain" is
> more general: an object refers to another object by referring to it,
> by unspecified means.  The reason why it is left unspecified is
> because the way a tree object refers to blobs and trees is different
> from the way a commit object refers to its parents (the former has
> object names of blobs and trees in the tree entries; the latter uses
> "parent" entries in the object header part to record object names of
> parent commits).  It wants to stress more on the fact that there is
> some mechanism to associate one object to others, than how that
> association/linkage is expressed.
>
> The way the resulting commit is described in the original text of
> "git merge" description stresses more on "how" by being a lot more
> specific to commit objects.  It does not just say "refers to parents
> (by unspecified means)"; instead it tries to say what exactly are
> recorded, i.e. the parents are referred to by recording the object
> names of them in a new commit object.  It stresses more on "how"
> (because it can afford to be more specific, unlike the description
> of more general concept of a "chain").