Re: Officially start moving to the term 'staging area'

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Drew Northup <n1xim.email@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> It has been discussed many times in the past that 'index' is not an
>>> appropriate description for what the high-level user does with it, and
>>> it has been agreed that 'staging area' is the best term.
>>
>> "add" is the verb, not "index" (which is a noun that refers
>> to the thing that keeps track of what will be written as a tree to
>> be committed next).
>>
>> And it will stay that way.
>>
>> IIRC, when this was discussed, many non-native speakers had trouble
>> with the verb "to stage", not just from i18n/l10n point of view.
>
> I agree with Junio.

All right, you are the only person (presumably other than Junio) that
thinks "index" is the right name for what high-level users should be
familiar with.

> This effort is better spent making the
> documentation clearer and more succinct. The reality is that a user
> needs to build a model in their mind of what they are doing which maps
> enough (completely is not required) to what is actually going on to
> get work done. If the documentation or the instruction is getting in
> the way of that in the name of simplifying the presentation then the
> presentation is wrong.
>
> We add content snapshots to the index of content (creating
> "temporary"--they will be garbage collected eventually if they become
> orphans--objects into the store at the same time). We build commits
> from those snapshots (in whole or in part, typically only using the
> most recent snapshots of new things added to the index) and save those
> in the object store with the content and tree objects. Sometimes we
> create tag objects to record something special about commits, trees,
> and content blobs.
>
> That's the real model (with some rough edges). Explaining what that
> has to do with distributed version control is the hard part.

The user doesn't need to know the format of the index, or the packs,
in fact, they don't even need to know the index or packs even exist.

All the user needs to know about this is that there's an area where
contents of the next commit are being prepared, and "staging area" is
the best name for that mental area. How that area is actually
implemented (the index) is not relevant to the user.

Everyone agrees on that, except you, and possibly Junio.

-- 
Felipe Contreras