Re: The git newbie experience

[Tommi Virtanen <tv@inoi.fi>]

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Anyway, I think the time to commit is too late to save somebody
> who does not understand the index.  How would you explain why
> you sometimes need to use -A and sometimes -a? 

I guess what I really want is "a smarter -a".

> That is why I
> suggested to make "git pull" and "git merge" refuse to work if
> there are local changes for novice users, where the definition
> of novice is "git commit -a" is the only way to make a commit.
> We can have [core] novice = yes in .git/config for that.
> 
> If somebody does not understand the index, if the merge is
> prevented because the local change does conflict with it, how
> would you explain why sometimes you can merge and sometimes you
> cannot?

By the same logic that is already implemented. "pull refuses to pull
changes to files that are modified but not committed".

>> For example, we had a case where we absolutely _had_ to keep
>> an ugly workaround in the tree, in a file not otherwise
>> edited, but we definitely did not want to commit the kludge,
> Your example is a very ill-thought out one.
>
> If you are leaving the uncommitable kludge around, you cannot be
> using "commit -a" with the normal non-merge workflow.  Why
> would you worry about not being able to do "commit -a" on a
> merge then?

The indexless working mode means you know two kinds of commits.
"git commit -a" or "git commit FILE..". The uncommitted kludge hanging
around means people listed file names. The case where the merge differs
is that it's not just a few files, and they didn't even really
know what files to list. And "git status" showed them something
they were not used to seeing.

> For the beginning user without index, I would rewrite your
> scenario like this.
> 
...
> - Jack stashes away what he has been working on and cleans up
>   his mess.
> 
>   git diff >P.diff
>   git checkout HEAD A B C
...
> - Jack then reapplies what he stashed away with "git apply P.diff"
>   and keeps working.
> 
> Maybe "git stash" command that does "git diff --full-index" with
> some frills, and "git unstash" command which does an equivalent
> of "git am -3" would help this workflow (bare "git apply" does
> not do the three-way merge like am does).

Oh, I'd love to have a quick stash, that's what we actually ended up
doing a lot. Although I'd rather see a real implementation use a branch
and not just a diff file, but.. yes please.

Although, "git stash" and "git unstash" are yet another command to add
to the newbie set, and I just complained about the size of the set ;)

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