Re: Call Me Gitless

["Alexander E Genaud" <alex@genaud.net>]

Hi Junio,

I would volunteer as the documentation git-virgin. To prove the hymen
intact, here are some of my thoughts and stumbling blocks over the
past two weeks:

There is no indication in the documentation distinguishing porcelain
from plumbing. Perhaps there is a grey scale, but operations that do
not move the HEAD to the latest should indicate that fact (for
example, pull vs. push, fetch).

Remote never seems to do what I expect, so I manually edit the
.git/refs!! Nor is git-reset what I expect and use git checkout (which
does make sense only after a few backup trials). Git-add adds to the
index but does not create, however git-rm removes from the index and
does delete (an --index-only or --keep flag might be nice).

A single term for cache and index should be decided upon. git diff
--cached is not intuitive when 'index' is used throughout the
documentation. Generally the index is a simple and powerful concept
that should be more thoroughly explained. Likewise for moving the
HEAD, though I don't yet grok it (git-reset HEAD^, git push, git
fetch).

Squashing commits into one is something I do often, and carefully read
the manual every time, whether it's merge, rebase -i, etc. I would
expect all merge-like functions to have an option to squash all new
commits into a new single commit (rather than upon the latest commit).
I'd also expect an abort option at all times during the git rebase -i.
For example, when asked to create a single squash commit message, I
might get cold feet.

I'd expect most commands to accept a branch argument without having to
check it out first, such as git-log and git-status. Git diff might
allow flags before branch, directories, etc to avoid ambiguity (such
as when a branch and directory have the same name)

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
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