Re: Git terminology: remote, add, track, stage, etc.

[Thore Husfeldt <thore.husfeldt@gmail.com>]

Thank you all for your many and well-thought out replies. I learned a lot.

Jonathan Nieder:

> So what would be a better term [for tracking]?

Trailing is better than tracking, since it hints at some degree of sloth, but I have not thought this through. (I also think that it may be a strategic mistake to advocate looking for a new name; as long as tracking is used consistently the problem with a misleading metaphor is not so big, and the name change alienates a large group of people whose consent is important.)

> How will a person used to e.g. cvs ever adjust if they don't even realize git is different?

This comment, and similar from others, makes it clear that I made a mistake in taking up staging versus tracking. It sends a wrong signal about my intentions, and is only a minor detail. This was *not* so difficult to understand, so I shouldn’t have included it. My annoyance here is merely aesthetic and pedagogical.

Matthiey Moy:

> Git's huge sin, after all (judging from most complaints I see about it), is that It Doesn't Use Exactly The Same Model (and thus Terminology) That CVS Did...


My analysis of Git’s wickedness is interestingly different. Git has a clean and simple model that should be very easy to understand. Git’s rhetorical traditions prevent that understanding. Git is really, really hard to learn, no matter where you come from, but there is no inherent reason for that.

The steepness of the learning curve (rather than the divergence from other systems’s terminology) is the single biggest complaint against git, evidenced by my own anecdotal evidence from web surfing, and by the Git user survey. It should be viewed as Git’s biggest current problem by an order of magnitude. It makes me think twice and thrice before asking my colleagues to collaborate with me using Git; I will probably learn Mercurial and advocate using that instead—it’s almost as nice, and I don’t feel embarrassed advocating it. Using git for myself is great (now I understand it) but it is unclear if I should invest social capital to convince others to use it as well. 

The magnitude of how bad this is, and the urgency with which this should be fixed, is clear to everybody—except, naturally, the denizens of this mailing list. Not out of malice or incompetence, but *because of* familiarity.

Sverre Rabbelier:


> What do you mean with the last part (about `git branch -r`)? The fact
> that 'refs/remotes' is not immutable?

Well, consider for example the simple obfuscatory mastery of the following line in the user manual:

> $ git branch -r			# list all remote branches


Yes, I get it *now*. And I begin to feel the corruption spreading in my own brain already: I myself start to think of origin/master as a “remote branch”. Give me a few more weeks and I will be completely assimilated in the mindset.

(Note to self: submit a patch about this before my assimilation is complete. I already fixed it and committed to my local branch.)

Mattiey again:

> We already came up with a better wording, namely "upstream", and used in in "git push --set-upstream". 

Oh, I didn’t know that. I was convinced that “upstream” was cruft from when git was chiefly a tool to help Linus maintain the Linux kernel. Let‘s see if I get this right:

The remote-tracking branch “origin/master” is *upstream* (the upstream?) of the local branch “master”, and *tracks* the remote origin’s branch “master”? (local) “master” is downstream of “origin/master”?

This would be useful. And @{u} is good. (Does it have an inverse?)

I’m not sure I like the particular word, but that’s a minor complaint. 

( For completeness: A small terminological quibble is that upstream doesn’t verb well. A bigger conceptual quibble is that this decision is not workflow-neutral. It enforces git’s hierarchical linux-kernel development  tradition, rather than embracing a truly distributed model where everybody is the same. When I think of distributed version control I like to think of Alice having a remote-tracking bob/master and Bob having a remote-tracking alice/master. Of course, it is still meaningful for Alice to say “the upstream of bobs_latest_crazy_ideas is bob/master”, and for Bob to say “the upstream of alices_inane_ramblings is alice/master”. But it introduces a notion of hierarchy that is inimical to the concept of distribution, and not workflow-neutral. )

Of course, upstream could be called supercalifragilistic and I would still like it. Consistency is more important than having good metaphors. (But good metaphors would be better, all other things being equal.)

Jakup Narebski:

> Note that it is not as easy as it seems at first glance.  There are *two* such options, which (as you can read in gitcli(7) manpage) have slightly different meaning:

Wow. Thanks for pointing this out, I did not know that, and it explains a lot. I must say that to everybody else than a git developer, this state of affairs is a proof that something is wrong, rather than an obstruction for improvement.

>  I do not think debating on changing the terminology is a particularly productive use of our time.  

I agree in the sense that *how* the words are used is more important than *which* words are used, and I realise that I should not have put “terminology” in the headline, because that makes it about words, not *explanations* or terminological *discipline*.