On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> It has been discussed many times in the past that 'index' is not an >> appropriate description for what the high-level user does with it, and >> it has been agreed that 'staging area' is the best term. > > "add" is the verb, not "index" (which is a noun that refers > to the thing that keeps track of what will be written as a tree to > be committed next). > > And it will stay that way. > > IIRC, when this was discussed, many non-native speakers had trouble > with the verb "to stage", not just from i18n/l10n point of view. I agree with Junio. This effort is better spent making the documentation clearer and more succinct. The reality is that a user needs to build a model in their mind of what they are doing which maps enough (completely is not required) to what is actually going on to get work done. If the documentation or the instruction is getting in the way of that in the name of simplifying the presentation then the presentation is wrong. We add content snapshots to the index of content (creating "temporary"--they will be garbage collected eventually if they become orphans--objects into the store at the same time). We build commits from those snapshots (in whole or in part, typically only using the most recent snapshots of new things added to the index) and save those in the object store with the content and tree objects. Sometimes we create tag objects to record something special about commits, trees, and content blobs. That's the real model (with some rough edges). Explaining what that has to do with distributed version control is the hard part. -- -Drew Northup -------------------------------------------------------------- "As opposed to vegetable or mineral error?" -John Pescatore, SANS NewsBites Vol. 12 Num. 59 -- 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