Re: improving the CG

[Trevor Daniels]

Carl Sorensen wrote Monday, December 28, 2009 5:25 AM

> Oh, I agree that it would have the added benefit of a greater 
> audience, but
> it would also cost more time for Mark to get it into the Git 
> documentation
> instead of into the LilyPond documentation.
> [...etc]


Many thanks, Carl.  I had exactly the same learning
experience as you and hold exactly the the same
view as you on this and the other points you make.
We can consider moving documentation into the git
arena at a later stage if it seems to be generally
useful.  But let's see it written first.

Thanks for explaining this so clearly.

My take on the learning experience is below ...

> On 12/27/09 6:45 PM, "John Mandereau" <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
>
> > Le dimanche 27 décembre 2009 à 18:20 -0700, Carl Sorensen a écrit 
> > :
> > > And I don't see much of a maintenance headache; basic git isn't 
> > > likely to
> > > change much, and all we're using is basic git.

> I can remember spending days trying to figure out how to work with 
> Git.  I
> read tutorial after tutorial, and man page after man page, and 
> nothing
> seemed to make sense.  Then, gradually, it started to make sense 
> to me, and
> now I'm quite comfortable with the set of commands I regularly 
> use.  But
> unfortunately, I can't remember now exactly what was so hard about 
> it.

In my case the main stumbling block was the jargon.
What was a "commit", a "committish"; what did "checkout"
mean and what exactly did it do?  There was also "index",
"working tree", "head", "pushing/pulling", "rebasing", and
many more.  The "explanation" of one of these concepts was
in terms of the other still-not-understood concepts.  And
the man pages were virtually useless initially - they just
gave a list of still-meaningless options.

I think it was the necessity to grasp all these concepts
at the same time that made starting with git so hard.

Trevor