Re: as promised, docs: git for the confused

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: 2005-12-13 05:18:37
On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Timo Hirvonen wrote:
> 
> Me too.  BTW, new users very likely read tutorial.txt first.  But it is
> way too low level (git-cat-file, git-write-tree...).  Maybe those low
> level commands should be described in technical/ instead?  The tutorial
> would be logical place for examples.

I'd almost suggest skipping the technical notes in the current tutorial, 
and just gearing it directly more towards a regular user. 

When I started writing it, I cared more about people understanding how git 
works internally. I think that was useful too, but I suspect that it's 
less useful than just knowing how to use git, and there _are_ enough 
people out there that understand how git works under the hood that it 
probably would be much better to concentrate on getting people _first_ 
used to using git, and then having a separate tutorial for "what goes 
under the hood".

So instead of teaching people about "git-read-tree --reset HEAD" etc that 
you'd never know on your own, just teach about "git reset". And not 
bothering with the "git-write-tree + git-commit-tree + git-update-ref" 
approach, just make people use "git commit" from the very beginning.

Anybody willing to just strip out the raw internals talk?

Then we could add a small section about importing from a tar-file. 

			Linus
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Received on Tue Dec 13 05:20:11 2005

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