Re: understanding how remote tracking works

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> Michael Witten wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 20:53, Geoff Russell <geoffrey.russell@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> I'm working my way through Jon Loeliger's Git book and it's
>>> confusing when the actual behaviour differs from that in the book
>>
>> This probably results from the git culture's conflation (or should I
>> say confusion?) of low-level and high-level representations and
>> commands.
>
> I guess I’ll bite.  What does that mean?  We have “show-ref” and
> “update-ref” precisely as low-level commands that are independent
> of representation.

I tend to agree with Michael (modulo s/ culture/'s early&/) here.  Many
documents written in the early days, the "tutorial" document by Linus
being the most prominent example, were written in a way to focus exposing
the implementation details to show how simple the structure is.  These
documents and tips by early adopters, simply by virtue of being old, are
found more easily by search engines.  Later we started encouraging use of
show-ref and update-ref to isolate users from the implementation details
that can be changed for performance reasons.

> Probably the more relevant question: what do you want to do about it?

Continue the current course of encouraging the use of plumbing commands
and not looking at the low-level implementation detail.  Perhaps help
people update their documents, moving stale descriptions into "historical
note" sections.