Re: [PATCH v2 3/4] doc: git-add: make explanation less dry

"D. Ben Knoble" <ben.knoble@gmail.com> writes:

I say no such thing, though. What I say about past mistakes is that you shouldn't use it as an excuse to make similar ones in the future.

I'd prefer to let a sleeping dog lie.

But in the context of this discussion, I think what we carefully and honestly need to look at are not past mistakes. It is importance to adjust to the new world we live in.

In early days of Git, people from older SCM systems did not grok the index very well, so our explanation of the concept of index and adding content to it may have focused on teaching the difference between our system and the back-then-major SCM systems. Unless you have used Bitkeeper, the "you can commit and your doing so would not bother anybody else" plus "you can rewrite your private history until you can pretend to be a super developer who came to the best solution with a single attempt" freedom were something quite new, and we needed to educate folks the way to think and work well in the distributed world. Earlier in one of my messages, I said "making a commit and switching to another commit is cheap", and that comment came out of habit, but that is only understood by folks who have used older SCM systems we displaced.

But with so many new users who haven't even touched anything other than Git, none of the above examples certainly may not be the best way to teach these things to these new crop of users.