On Wed, 28 Nov 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. Sure. However the people for whom I produced the cheat-sheet have to deal with the repo I maintain, which has multiple branches already, and using an explicit "git remote add" allows for better names than the default "origin". Right there they become aware of the easy branching possibilities of Git. And with a constantly rewritten history in that repo, they have to rebase after every fetch and there is no released Git version with a short-hand for fetch+rebase. Nicolas - 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
