On Fri, 24 Apr 2009, Johan Herland wrote: > On Friday 24 April 2009, Michael Witten wrote: > > On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 17:51, Johan Herland <johan@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > There's also http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/ which I > > > think is a great bottom-up introduction: > > > - not too heavy on the concepts > > > > I really don't understand this mentality. Concepts are the only things > > that are important. From concepts falls all else. > > Sorry for not being clear: Concepts are indeed (and should be) important. > What I mean is that the concepts introduced are short and simple enough for > novice users to understand (without much VCS experience, if any at all). If > we start off _too_ detailed, we risk loosing the audience, and no one is > better off. > > Like Jeff King said elsewhere in this thread: We want to start a little > higher from the bottom. The above introduction does not focus on blobs or > trees, but manages to introduce Git in a useful manner by starting off with > only two concepts: commits and refs. I'd say that blobs and trees are an implementation detail of "the full content of a version of the project", not something conceptually important. Likewise, the date representation used in commits isn't important. It might be worth saying that git purposefully discards any information in your filesystem that is just incidental and not project content, like whether other users on the system where the working directory is can access your files; but a full enumeration of what the "content" and "incidental" categories contain can go in an appendix or something. (FWIW, git originally didn't use tree objects for subdirectories or mask out the g+w bit from tree entries. These weren't conceptual changes, but implementation details.) -Daniel *This .sig left intentionally blank* -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html