Re: [Census] So who uses git?

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 13:33, Junio C Hamano wrote:

"J. Bruce Fields" [off-list ref] writes:

I think many good stuff git offers would not be helpful to the
users until index is understood as the third entity, in addition
to the usual "committed state" and "working tree state".  It
might be better to talk about it sooner rather than later.  And
the tool is geared towards taking advantage of it, so until the
user understands that, behaviour of some tools would feel
unintuitive.

Agreed.

You can have local throw-away modifications while applying
patches and merging (I once broke merges by ignoring that it is
perfectly valid to have index and working tree files be
different and keep working that way.  That was a hard lesson).
The index file knows what working tree changes are meant to be
committed.  Another thing I find useful, which cannot be done
without index, is to sanity check while developing.  When "git
diff" gives too many diffs, running update-index on paths that I
think are more-or-less OK helps to reduce clutter, and I can
view only further changes to those paths.

And right there is where people get caught by surprise.
What "they" then want to do is actually pick certain
files to commit.  And when they do, they get caught off
guard by the _additional_ files.

I have done this style of "update-index on more-or-less OK
files in order to clear up the diff.  And it is also in that
time frame that I start feeling that certain changes belong
to "one commit" or another.  The result is, I want to then
pick the parts that get committed together.  But _really_
being certain exactly which files, and _only_ those files,
will really be committed is tough.

jdl