Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git wiki

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: May 3, 2006, 17:06 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605030958370.4086@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20060503164732.GB9820@thunk.org>

On Wed, 3 May 2006, Theodore Tso wrote:

> 
> Of course, a lot of it is that git *is* much more powerful, much like
> the difference between a stickshift with a racing clutch (git) and a
> car with an automatic transmission (hg).

I don't think that's necessarily a good comparison.

The "easy things" are easy even with git. Our explanation pages and tutorials just tend to want to show off, and do more than they need to.

Even the "everyday git in 20 commands" actually starts out scaring people with listing commands that they don't need to know about immediately. The whole fsck/count-object/pruning thing shouldn't even be mentioned until after you've shown how easy it is to just do

	git init-db
	git add .
	git commit -a

to import an old project, and then do an example commit or something (one of the early examples).

So yeah. We should have a main page that starts off with the "everyday git" link (preferably further simplified) very prominently, and just looks less scary.

People are probably already expecting the worst - partly because git is newer than some of the other projects (not hg, but svn/svk/monotone etc), and partly because I was actively trying to not over-promise or over-sell early on when it wasn't clear how good git was going to get..

So looking pretty and easy to use is clearly important, and I think git has the _capability_ for that, we've not just documented it that way.

			Linus