Re: [PATCH] Add a birdview-on-the-source-code section to the user manual

["J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>]

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 05:10:47PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> In http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/42479,
> a birdview on the source code was requested.
> 
> J. Bruce Fields suggested that my reply should be included in the
> user manual, and there was nothing of an outcry, so here it is,
> not even 2 months later.

Looks helpful, concise, and to the point.  Neat-o.

Acked-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@citi.umich.edu>

Comments, nothing major:

> +If you grasp the ideas in that initial commit (it is really small and you 
> +can get into it really fast, and it will help you recognize things in the 
> +much larger code base we have now), you should go on skimming `cache.h`, 
> +`object.h` and `commit.h`.

Might want to add "in a recent commit"?--it's not clear that you've
transitioned away from talking about the initial commit.

> +This is just to get you into the groove for the most libified part of Git: 
> +the revision walker.

Unless the reader has already been hanging out on the mailing list a
while, "most libified" may not mean much to them yet at this point.

The organization of the next bit is slightly confusing: we're set up to
expect a longer lecture on the revision walker, but instead there's just
the historical note on git-rev-list, a mention of 'revision.c',
'revision.h', and 'struct rev_info', and then it rapidly digresses into
discussing builtins.

Which actually is fine, but just a few small markers of where we are in
the discussion might be reassuring--a section header or two, maybe a
little more emphasis on the pointers you're giving, like: "take a moment
to go read revision.h and revision.c now, paying special attention to
struct rev_info, which ....".

--b.