Hi,
On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, Dmitry Potapov wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 06:21:02PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> >
> > I had the pleasure of introducing Git to a few users in the last
> > months and in my opinion, restricting myself to teaching them these
> > commands first helped tremendously:
> >
> > - clone, pull, status, add, commit, push, log
>
> Yes, it is a good list, and I think it is very important at the
> beginning to limit the number commands to 7-8, otherwise many users may
> be confused. And, of course, it is better to stay away from all
> command-line options at first...
Thanks.
> > All of these were presented without options, to keep things simple.
> >
> > In particular, I refrained from giving them the "-a" option to commit.
> > That seemed to help incredibly with their embracing the index as a
> > natural concept (which it is).
>
> Most things that we call as "natural" is those that we got used.
In this case, I have to add that it is natural because it is the way you
_have_ to do it. Even if the other SCMs hide it.
You almost never commit a full revision. You usually update just a couple
of files. Now, even CVS has an extra command to add a file, so it accepts
the fact that staging and committing are two different operations, even if
"cvs add" does not stage the changes of a tracked file.
Of course, it is easier for us: we can use all the lessons learnt from
CVS.
> > Now, it makes me really, really sad that Git has a reputation of being
> > complicated, but I regularly hear from _my_ users that they do not
> > understand how that came about.
>
> I think this reputation is largely due to people who open Git user
> manual, read about >100 commands, were horrified and stopped learning.
Heh. I catually would be delighted if one outcome of this discussion
would be that the user manual starts with a nice big chapter describing
just my first set of commands, without options.
Another nice outcome could be if all the plumbing man pages were moved
into a different section, and all the porcelain's man pages would be
changed to avoid referring to plumbing.
It could be a good idea, too, to explain advanced topics not by command,
but by scenario.
> > Am I the only one who deems teaching plumbing to users ("I like it
> > raw! So I teach it the same way!") harmful?
>
> There is only one thing that seems to be true about teaching Git (or
> anything else) -- there is no single method that works equally well
> for anyone.
I disagree. I think that the first steps are the same for everyone.
Ciao,
Dscho
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