Re:Key Git Concepts Explained the Hard Way
by chopin on Thursday March 15, 2018 @03:35AM
(#16591019)
In such cases, I look for my problem on stackoverflow. When I find a solution which seems right to me, I look up https://git-scm.com/docs to get a better understanding of what I am doing and why.
The problem with many documentations is that they are not use-case driven. Much of it is a functionality description. Such as:
- To fasten, you have to turn the nut clockwise.
instead of:
- To fit these two parts together you need to fasten the nuts onto the screws.
Here's hg help rm:
Oh, I don't want hg rm, I want hg forget. hg help forget confirms this: Okay, let's ask git help rm: For this to be any use, you have to remember that "index" refers to the staging area and not anything else that might reasonably be presumed to be an index (such as the commit history). Of course, if you knew there was a glossary, you could double-check the definition in the glossary, only to find that the definition (a collection of files with stat information, whose contents are stored as objects) is about as useful as the infamous "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors," but the latter was supposed to be a joke.Sure, some problems with git may be that people have trouble understanding the concepts. But many of them are due to git's impenetrable documentation and a few of the commands that do too many things. The sheer resistance of many adherents of git to recognize that it has a UX problem is just mind-boggling.