Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] Making "git commit" to mean "git commit -a".

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 09:44:03 +0100

Carl Worth wrote:
> 
> See? Git _is_ harder to learn, and a user really cannot learn it
> without being careful about the index right from the very beginning.
> 

I'm not so sure about that. I came from CVS / SVN, although I've fiddled 
quite a bit with other scm's as well. The two-step commit process of git 
didn't terrify me at all, and I had used git at least a month before I 
joined the mailing-list and found out that there's this thing called an 
"index". I knew about it before, since back then (June or July 2005) 
there was only git-update-index to mark things to commit. I just didn't 
worry about it but expected the scm to tell me if I was about to break 
something horribly (which it often but not always did).

I think the main thing people are having difficulties with when it comes 
to git is that it doesn't do things like other SCM's do it. Imo this is 
a good thing, because it allows git to be more powerful than other 
SCM's. Otoh it forces users migrating from 
darcs/hg/monotone/perforce/whatever to git actually read the 
documentation (and quite a lot of it), while hg -> bzr migrators use 
pretty much the same commands for pretty much the same actions. This 
makes users accustomed to not reading docs / trying things out before 
attempting Real Work(tm), which breaks down horribly when user 
expectations doesn't match reality. The simplest and usually most 
effective solution is to meet the users half-way, and tell them early on 
that this power comes at the cost of having to read the documentation 
and do the tutorials.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se