Johannes Schindelin wrote:
Hi,
there have been a number of occasions where I came across people trying to
be helpful and teaching Git newbies a few tricks.
However, in quite a number of cases, which seem to surge over the last
weeks, I see people suggesting the use of rev-parse, ls-tree, rev-list
etc.
Their rationale is invariably "but I found it useful", and they seem to be
unable to recognize the puzzlement in the faces of the people they are
trying to help.
Instead they insist that they did nothing wrong.
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
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).
Often I presented the "pull" and "push" commands _only_ with "origin
master" ("origin is where the repository came from, and master is the
branch; you will want to use other parameters here after you used Git for
a while").
_After_ they grew comfortable with Git, I taught them a few options here
and there, not hiding, but also not promoting the full range of options.
So the next tricks were
- log -p, rm, diff, diff --cached, show
The last one is "show", and with that command, I taught the
"<commit>:" and "<commit>:<file>" syntax, too (which some Git old-timers
did not know about ;-)
Thanks for the excellent write-up. I wish I'd had this when I did the
introductory courses at my dayjob. With those simple commands, 90%
of the users get access to 90% of the usefulness of git, imo. And,
more importantly, it's enough to get them started right away.
The pace needed to be adjusted to the users, in my experience, but not the
order.
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.
Am I the only one who deems teaching plumbing to users ("I like it raw!
So I teach it the same way!") harmful?
I wholeheartedly agree. Telling people about "git rev-list" on day one
is probably the single greatest mistake I've ever done wrt git. To the
non-gitizen, it takes some mumbo-jumbo arguments and spits out a long
list of mumbo-jumbo output. Had I started with "git log" instead, it
would have been infinitely easier to explain how each commit has a
totally unique name.
In addition, I'd recommend setting
color.branch=auto
color.diff=auto
color.pager=true
color.status=true
before starting the "course". It makes the learning experience a whole
lot nicer.
--
Andreas Ericsson andreas.ericsson@xxxxxx
OP5 AB www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231
--
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
