Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH 0/2] Documentation: kicking the "reset --hard" habit

From: "J. Bruce Fields" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2010 16:03:33 -0400

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 05:25:20PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 01:55, Matthieu Moy
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> >> Sadly, at least the user manual change suggested below is probably
> >> not suitable, since reset --keep and --merge have not been around
> >> since git 1.5.3 days.  Ideas for working around that and other
> >> comments would be welcome.
> >
> > Do we really want to keep the user manual compatible with 1.5.3
> > forever? It's nice to keep the user manual usable by slightly outdated
> > Gits, but 1.5.3 starts being really old, and older docs are still
> > available on the web (like
> > http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/v1.5.3.8/git.html ).
> 
> I didn't know we even did this with our user manual. When I read
> manuals for version X (e.g. PostgreSQL, Emacs or libc versions) I
> fully expect the features described to only work on the documented
> version unless otherwise noted.

Yeah, previous versions of the user manual are still around if people
need them.  For a book or an independent website a wider range of
versions would make more sense, but for documentation destributed with
the git source I think we can afford to be more aggressive.

If we think information about old versions is really important maybe
someone could find a way to incorporate it in a way that doesn't intrude
into the main text too much (e.g. footnotes or an appendix.)

--b.