jnareb

Even taking into account the fact that its is "parable" and not recount of the history of Git (which you can find in some detail on Git Wiki, by the way), one point stays: it is IMVHO bad practice to explain staging area in the terms of splitting changes into more than one commit and/or comitting with dity tree, i.e. with some changes uncomitted. Staging area main strength (besides being explicit version of other SCMs implicit to-be-added area) is dealing with CONFLICTED MERGE, and that is how it should be explained, I think.

A few issues where "The Git Parable" diverges from real git history and real git behavior:

1. From the beginning it was known that simple numbering system for snapshot (commit) names would not work without constant access to single central 'numbering authority'. So the history of git is without this meandering; on the other hand git had example in Monotone, existing distributed version control system. But this is certainly minor issue.

2. The staging area was not created to be able to split changes into more than one commit or keep dirty files in working area (with changes which do not go into snapshot). This is side benefit, and something you should not abuse. The main reason behind staging area is merging. This is IMHO fairly important didactic issue.

3. Git calculates SHA1 of uncompressed object, and then uzes zlib compression on it, not vice versa as it is said at the end of "The Git Parable". It used to be the way described (first compress, then SHA1 of compressed contents) for a very short time and was abandoned; current way allow to transparently improve compression.

This supposedly got corrected. Session cookie expiration is now 3 hours, and page uses JavaScript to keep cookie fresh, so it shouldn't timeout if you keep it open.

And you can always submit it, and go back to it later to fill the rest.

You can always skip some questions, which IIRC is stated upfront. Or if you don't mind it leaving a cookie you can submit partially filled survey, and return to it and fill the rest of it later (which was stated in the message after filling and submitting the survey).