On Thursday 29 November 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Nicolas Pitre <nico@xxxxxxx> writes: > > ... In all the tutorials for $job I've done so > > far, I simply never talk about pull nor clone, but rather about init, > > "git remote", fetch and merge, with explicit and meaningful branch > > names. I think that basic commands, even if there is a bit more of > > them, make Git easier to learn and understand than talking about those > > magic meta commands hiding the truth away. > > That's actually a quite interesting approach for teaching. > > The original "tutorial" (now core-tutorial) was similar in spirit; it > built the user experience by starting at sequence of low level commands, > and then finally said "since this is so often used combination, there is > a short-hand for it that does all". I think the approach would work > quite well for people who want to use the tool with deep understanding. > > However, I am not so sure about people who just want canned set of > instructions and follow them blindly to get their work done. And I do > not think the latter classes of users are necessarily wrong. > > Such a canned set of instructions would (if the project that supplies > the cheat-sheet encourages merges instead of rebases) talk about "clone > then commit then push then pull and repeat", without mentioning what > pull does is fetch+merge nor what fetch means and what merge means, and > that would let people get started without deeper understanding. > > But the lack of deeper understanding would hurt them in the longer run > (e.g. "my push was rejected with something called non-fast-forward --- > what does that mean and what would I do now?"). What about ending the cheat-sheet with a big fat link to a FAQ? The FAQ answers common questions like the above (resulting from the cheat-sheet glossing over the details) with links to appropriate sections in the more thorough introduction (core-tutorial), explaining what's _really_ going on. Just a thought. Have fun! :) ...Johan -- Johan Herland, <johan@xxxxxxxxxxx> www.herland.net - 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
