Felipe Contreras [off-list ref] writes:
Proposal:
Avoid the terms 'cache' and 'index' in favor of 'stage'.
I completely agree that something needs to be done.
But there are at least two points that were raised during the previous
discussions that need to be taken into account:
* Currenly, "index" and "staging area" are not exactly synonyms. When
used with "git add" and "git commit" (without -a), the index is the
staging area for the next commit. But when used by "git merge", the
index is more a "merging area".
* There is currently a distinction in the meaning of --cached and
--index. See the end of Documentation/gitcli.txt. I think it is good
to have this distinction, but I agree that the wording of current
option name is wrong (i.e. without having read gitcli.txt, I don't
think anyone could have guessed this distinction). Perhaps something
like --staged-only/--staged-too?
About the name, an alternative to "stage" was suggested earlier:
"precommit". If we were to rewrite Git from scratch, I'd argue in favor
of this one, which is really easy to understand, especially for
non-native (you really need to know what a "commit" is to use Git, and
then infering the meaning of precommit is easy). But we probably have
already a too long history of changing the name, so introducing yet
another one is perhaps counter-productive. I don't know.
--
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/
On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Matthieu Moy
[off-list ref] wrote:
Felipe Contreras [off-list ref] writes:
* Currenly, "index" and "staging area" are not exactly synonyms. When
used with "git add" and "git commit" (without -a), the index is the
staging area for the next commit. But when used by "git merge", the
index is more a "merging area".
And what is the difference? The result of the 'merging area' is still a commit.
About the name, an alternative to "stage" was suggested earlier:
"precommit". If we were to rewrite Git from scratch, I'd argue in favor
of this one, which is really easy to understand, especially for
non-native (you really need to know what a "commit" is to use Git, and
then infering the meaning of precommit is easy). But we probably have
already a too long history of changing the name, so introducing yet
another one is perhaps counter-productive. I don't know.
I don't know, precommit is not an English word, and it was discussed
before, but not many people vouched for it.
Plus, it's not already widely used in the interwebs documentation as
staging area is.
Cheers.
--
Felipe Contreras
On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 11:16 PM, Felipe Contreras
[off-list ref] wrote:
I don't know, precommit is not an English word, and it was discussed
before, but not many people vouched for it.
FWIW in the Icelandic translation I translated "index/stage" to the
equivalent of "the commit area".
On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 7:26 AM, Matthieu Moy
[off-list ref] wrote:
About the name, an alternative to "stage" was suggested earlier:
"precommit"
Thanks! That was the first that explained to me what cache, index, and
stage was talking about. +1 from me (not that count much).