Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 3/4] doc: git-add: make explanation less dry

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2025 13:01:53 -0700

"D. Ben Knoble" <[email-masked]> writes:

> As Junio likes to say, a mistake being old is no good reason to carry
> it forward into the future (or replicate it).

I say no such thing, though.  What I say about past mistakes is that
you shouldn't use it as an excuse to make similar ones in the
future.

I'd prefer to let a sleeping dog lie.

But in the context of this discussion, I think what we carefully and
honestly need to look at are not past mistakes.  It is importance to
adjust to the new world we live in.

In early days of Git, people from older SCM systems did not grok the
index very well, so our explanation of the concept of index and
adding content to it may have focused on teaching the difference
between our system and the back-then-major SCM systems.  Unless you
have used Bitkeeper, the "you can commit and your doing so would not
bother anybody else" plus "you can rewrite your private history
until you can pretend to be a super developer who came to the best
solution with a single attempt" freedom were something quite new,
and we needed to educate folks the way to think and work well in the
distributed world.  Earlier in one of my messages, I said "making a
commit and switching to another commit is cheap", and that comment
came out of habit, but that is only understood by folks who have
used older SCM systems we displaced.

But with so many new users who haven't even touched anything other
than Git, none of the above examples certainly may not be the best
way to teach these things to these new crop of users.