Re: Call Me Gitless

Hi Junio,

I would volunteer as the documentation git-virgin. To prove the hymen intact, here are some of my thoughts and stumbling blocks over the past two weeks:

There is no indication in the documentation distinguishing porcelain from plumbing. Perhaps there is a grey scale, but operations that do not move the HEAD to the latest should indicate that fact (for example, pull vs. push, fetch).

Remote never seems to do what I expect, so I manually edit the .git/refs!! Nor is git-reset what I expect and use git checkout (which does make sense only after a few backup trials). Git-add adds to the index but does not create, however git-rm removes from the index and does delete (an --index-only or --keep flag might be nice).

A single term for cache and index should be decided upon. git diff --cached is not intuitive when 'index' is used throughout the documentation. Generally the index is a simple and powerful concept that should be more thoroughly explained. Likewise for moving the HEAD, though I don't yet grok it (git-reset HEAD^, git push, git fetch).

Squashing commits into one is something I do often, and carefully read the manual every time, whether it's merge, rebase -i, etc. I would expect all merge-like functions to have an option to squash all new commits into a new single commit (rather than upon the latest commit). I'd also expect an abort option at all times during the git rebase -i. For example, when asked to create a single squash commit message, I might get cold feet.

I'd expect most commands to accept a branch argument without having to check it out first, such as git-log and git-status. Git diff might allow flags before branch, directories, etc to avoid ambiguity (such as when a branch and directory have the same name)

Cheers, Alex