From: "Felipe Contreras" <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, May
05, 2012 6:30 PM
On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Philip Oakley <philipoakley@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
From: "Felipe Contreras" <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, May
05, 2012 2:04 PM
Proposal:
Avoid the terms 'cache' and 'index' in favor of 'stage'.
Advantages:
The term 'stage' is more intuitive for newcomers which are more
familiar with English than with git, and it seems to be a
straightforward mental notion for people from different mother
tongues.
It is so intuitive that it is used already in a lot online
documentation, and the people that do teach git professionally use
this term.
I've never found any of the terms to be great (as per this discussion
;-).
The term that helped me most, heard on one of the git videos, was "it's
like
a manifest", alluding to a 'shipping manifest', which then leads to both
the
"staging area" and "index" terms. Though "index" is probably too
technical
for most folk.
The allusion to shipping a consignment or rail marshalling
(classification)
yards, and similar freight flows
Perhaps, but these terms are not already used everywhere, unlike
'stage', and haven't been brought in past discussions. Personally the
word 'manifest' says nothing to me (manifesto?), neither does
consignment, or marshalling.
Useful to know.. The fact that there is such a variety of terms, usually
based on specialist transport, is an indication of our on-going
difficulties - people just don't talk about this aspect of 'work'. Usually
it (packaging) is 'someone else's problem' ;-) E.g. what's it called when
the post office batches up mail in the 'sorting' office? - I don't know, nor
usually care, except when I just post 60 letters to Hawaii - should I put a
band around them to 'help' the post office ... In the git case, unusually
for a VCS, we do our own grouping, but need a verb.
Aside: wikipedia notes that even UK and US English railways can't agree
their term
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshalling_yards) on what to call the
'staging' process we are discussing
I looked up a translation (I hope I haven't mis-chosen):
shipping manifest (n) (bill or inventory enclosed with a consignment)
manifiesto de carga (nm)
so (to me) it does look like "index" is the best word for our *list* of what
we have
prepared, and the stage of preparation of those items for our next commit
(shipment to the repo).
It probably doesn't help that the concepts and the implementation aren't
always in alignment (a generic DVCS problem). e.g. when we `add` a file, a
copy goes straight into our objects store, but isn't actually 'in' the repo.
So the discussion suffers from knowing too much.
As discussed before, we need a term that
has a nice noun (stage), verb (to stage), and past-participle
(staged). There have been a lot of suggestions, but nothing as good as
'stage', which is presumably the reason why it's so prevalent in
online documentation.
Ooops, my note about my wording suggestions being used for *explanation* got
lost in
the trimming. I wasn't suggesting a change to the candidate terms.
Maybe you are quite familiar with ships :)
UK - home of the railways, and the SS Great Britain, and the Titanic ...
Philip
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