Re: [1.8.0] use 'stage' term consistently

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:

I completely agree that something needs to be done.

But there are at least two points that were raised during the previous discussions that need to be taken into account:

* Currenly, "index" and "staging area" are not exactly synonyms. When
  used with "git add" and "git commit" (without -a), the index is the
  staging area for the next commit. But when used by "git merge", the
  index is more a "merging area".

* There is currently a distinction in the meaning of --cached and
  --index. See the end of Documentation/gitcli.txt. I think it is good
  to have this distinction, but I agree that the wording of current
  option name is wrong (i.e. without having read gitcli.txt, I don't
  think anyone could have guessed this distinction). Perhaps something
  like --staged-only/--staged-too?

About the name, an alternative to "stage" was suggested earlier: "precommit". If we were to rewrite Git from scratch, I'd argue in favor of this one, which is really easy to understand, especially for non-native (you really need to know what a "commit" is to use Git, and then infering the meaning of precommit is easy). But we probably have already a too long history of changing the name, so introducing yet another one is perhaps counter-productive. I don't know.