Re: Git in a Nutshell guide

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Nov 19, 2007, 22:01 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0711191617150.12193@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <3057F6F3-BEAA-447A-AB79-A0AFB7DB8826@lrde.epita.fr>

On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Benoit Sigoure wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On Nov 19, 2007, at 5:14 PM, Jonas Juselius wrote:
> >On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 17:05 +0100, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> > >Do I understand correctly that you don't support cloning via git://
> > >protocol?
> >
> >Yes, that is correct. The machine is behind a number of firewalls, and I
> >simply cannot be bothered to go through the bureaucracy...
> 
> You can create a repository on repo.or.cz then :)
> 
> As it is often the case different people happen to work on similar things
> without knowing each other.  I started http://repo.or.cz/w/tutorial.git which
> is meant to be a big Beamer presentation that presents Git thoroughly.  I
> wrote some ideas but didn't start to write the slides.  Just in case you want
> to have a look.
> 
> One of the things you said in your guide is that Git is easy to learn.  I
> think this is wrong.  Git is way more complicated than most other SCMs,
> especially compared to SVN.

I convinced my little company to switch to git (from arch, so take this with a grain of salt). I'd previously written a document explaining how to use arch, and I wrote a version for git, which said practically nothing, because everything I'd been able to do in arch is trivial to do in git. But I used the same format, anyway, to be sure to cover everything. I also told them to ask me if they were trying to do something and couldn't. I believe that all of the questions I've gotten were on how to use "advanced features" (i.e., things not included in my document because I never figured out how to do them with arch and decided to just live without), and people are using git successfully.

The main difference I see is that "save" and "publish" are separate operations with git and the same with other SCMs, but the separate concepts are obvious to anybody who's emailled a word processor document to somebody, and the distinction just has to be mentioned.

The challenge in writing a good introduction to git is leaving out explanations of all of the wonderful things that git can do that people don't expect to be within the abilities of an SCM. If you limit yourself to saying how to do things that SCMs can traditionally do, and therefore only explain how to do what people know they want to do, it's not to hard for people to learn. Of course, that's not enough to make good use of git, but it's enough to declare a transition from SVN or CVS successful.

I personally think it would be worth having a pair of documents, with the first being "everything you need to know", and the second being "things you'll find helpful that aren't strictly necessary".

	-Daniel
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