This session was led by brian m. carlson. Supporting cast: Jeff "Peff"
King, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Taylor Blau, Philip Oakley, Emily Shaffer,
CB Bailey, and Jonathan "jrnieder" Nieder.
Notes:
1. Background: answering on StackOverflow, other avenues for user questions,
even users from very large companies
2. How can we improve documentation?
3. Maybe even think about translating docs such as FAQs
4. Peff: there’s an effort to translate manpages
1. brian: Saw an announcement, haven’t seen what came of it
2. Peff: Some translated pages are live on git-scm.com (a github repo with
translations)
3. Ævar: It uses a third-party tool (po4a) that uses gettext by making each
paragraph a translated string. So it’s the same workflow as translating
code changes
4. Taylor: https://github.com/jnavila/git-manpages-l10n
5. Philip Oakley: I see manpages used as reference material instead of
educational documents
1. Audience often already knows what they’re looking up
2. That approach makes it harder to bring people in. Examples are of the
difficult things instead of how to get started, workable examples that
can be copy/pasted straight into the shell and tell you how things go
3. Emily: We have the two-part Git tutorial (“git help tutorial”) which is
part of manpages, but I think it’s pretty dated. It starts with how to
convert your zipfile-based software distribution to Git which is not
where most people start these days
4. Philip: user manual also is not accessible as part of manual
5. CB: I wonder if this is even where people look. A lot of new users will
hit Google and find git-scm.com/book which historically has been a very
good introduction
6. Slightly misleading calling it Pro Git because it has good
introductions
7. Philip: maybe the Git project wants to state: we don’t make great
documentation, look elsewhere
8. jrnieder: thank you for the perspective. It’s not quite the intent,
though, we might just not do a good enough job. For example, when
examples are too complex, that’s worth improving
9. Used to have active contributors who maintained documentation better
(e.g., Jon Loeliger)
10. A part of the problem is the format. Pro Git can include diagrams, the
Git user manual can’t (or at least doesn’t)
11. brian: likes Pro Git, but maybe not the best for new folks (it assumes
some familiarity with source code management)
12. In stackoverflow you can see how people answer questions, how much less
existing background they assume
13. Ævar: One issue with the Pro Git book is that it is not under a free
software license (though it is free of charge). That means it can’t be
included in free software distributions.
14. I want to close the gap between output we emit and providing backlinks
to relevant documentation. E.g. sometimes when we emit advice output,
we say what config variable is involved and sometimes we don’t
15. Having documentation distributed with Git is also helpful for having
something that’s up to date and matches the code people are using
16. Philip Oakley: Google Season of Docs is a place we can help
17. brian: Mining stackoverflow has been very helpful for FAQs, helps avoid
having to give the same answer again and again
18. Goal is to have a good FAQ in git/git, to be able to link to from
StackOverflow
19. Perl approach of including references in error messages is very useful
for people being able to solve their own problems
20. Ævar: “git help git” landing page is not so helpful. I’d prefer
something like the perl manpage that gives an overview and table of
contents and nothing else, instead of incorporating reference
documentation about common options
21. brian: I’d like to see both in the toplevel manpage. “How to invoke
git” is something people expect to see when they run “man git”
22. Ævar: agreed about synopsis, as long as it focuses on the commonly used
options
23. Peff: every time I want to look up perl commandline options, I run “man
perl”, get annoyed, and then run “man perlrun”. I think “man git” does
the things you’re describing but organized poorly. Even “git help”
output does a better job of organizing. I also wouldn’t be sad to see
the options section coming after.
24. CB: dashed commands should not be listed
6. Emily: Side topic: the state of git help on stackoverflow is abysmal
1. Doesn’t have much Git project presence, devrel teams focus on
company-specific things instead of Git basics.
2. A lot of answers are just wrong
3. Someone spending some 20% time on that could improve things a lot and in
the process would see where people are struggling, which can help us
make Git more intuitive and make better intuitive tutorial documentation
4. Ævar: Having a commonly cited FAQ used in stackoverflow can be great
7. Philip: there are commands that are (at least almost) undocumented, e.g.
git rerere
1. brian: Have seen occasions where people struggled with commands like
this
2. Ævar: have seen undocumented patches
3. Tried to improve documentation e.g. git fetch --prune, sometimes
phrasing is too concise to be helpful
4. Emily: getting confused e.g. when notes are transported via operations
such as rebase
5. Philip: may go in hand with the lack of good examples
8. Lots of good ideas for contributions!
