On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:45:30 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Thanks for starting this. It was an interesting read. You're welcome. I hope it's useful for people. The original goal was to demonstrate that git is no harder to learn than mercurial. So that attempt is done, now, (whether successful or not, I can't really judge). Now, after getting some initial feedback, it's clear that the document could further be improved by focusing on the "git way" of doing things that aren't as natural in hg, (like multiple branches in a single repository). Rather than extending the current document, though, I think I'll just draw up on outline based on what I think would be a good order to introduce the topics. And then I'll see what text in the current user's guide could plug into that outline, and what pieces might be missing or could be improved. At least, that's my thoughts for now. I don't know if I'll get around to it though, (we'll have to see if I get annoyed into doing that work like I got annoyed into this first project). > "git help init" would give man page. The time when the short > help is given is when you mistype options, as in: > > $ git init --huh? Oh, and that's *really* short output. Just a summary of the command-line options and no description. If you look at "hg help" it has a middle-ground option which is little more than a brief description and a very small number of options. I think that's a useful thing to consider for "git help". Or, perhaps just carefully construct the man page so that this most important information is first. See "git help clone" for example which does have a better order than "git help init" in my opinion. Meanwhile, "git init --huh?" is totally appropriate in just printing usage information. That's really all you want to see if you forget the exact name of a particular command-line option. Trying a couple of random examples though, git could be better in some cases: $ git log --pretty=complete fatal: invalid --pretty format: complete That's a fairly specific error message, but no information on what I might have meant to say. A fix should be be quite simple, (presumably there's a list of --pretty options it just looped through and it might as well print them out). $ git log --format=fuller fatal: unrecognized argument: --format=fuller There's no usage given in this case at all. It should print some usage statement, hopefully containing --pretty. Admittedly, this one is *really* hard to fix entirely since there is a ridiculously large number of possible options to a command like "git log". But a summary of the most common stuff should still help. Thanks for the various typo fixes. I've implemented those, (and the things submitted by others). There were some particularly bad markup problems where "git commit <file>" was being misinterpreted and presented as "git commit" which was fairly disastrous for my intended meaning. Hopefully it's much better now. -Carl
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