On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 08:53:37PM -0400, David Abrahams wrote: >> Actually, it is not the generally of trees that I think is interesting >> there, but the generality of _objects_. That is, each of those things is >> a first-class object, and has a unique name by which it can be >> referred. > > I'm sorry, but I think most people would find that so unremarkable that > making a big deal about it would lead to "what am I missing here" > confusion. Maybe a person who's exclusively used CVS (or older) > technologies before coming to Git would be happy to know that, but it's > sort of obvious. In CVS the lack of first-class directories sticks out > like a sore thumb. Sadly, I was away from email all weekend and so missed the ensuing storm in this thread. :) However, I did want to respond to this one point. To me (and I am talking from personal experience, so it really may be _just_ me), an important part of understanding git was understanding the object storage. That is, half of the idea of git is a big database of content-addressable objects. The _other_ half is the actual VCS built on top of it. ;) And by understanding that, and the places where objects refer to each other (commits point to other commits and to trees, trees point to blobs, blobs are always leaves), I find it easier to understand what each operation is doing. And that if I'm unsure of something, I can always inspect it at many levels. I don't know. Maybe that is too low-level for most people. I did end up working on git, so perhaps I am inordinately interested. -Peff -- 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