quoted

I agree. The "stage area" is a very important concept in git, why not
talk git commands that refers to it? Then we could add flags like
--new-files or --deleted-files for better granularity than the current
--all flag.

One caution: The term "stage/staged" is already a little overloaded.
We generally use the word "staged" to refer to changes that are in the
index, but the term "stage" as a noun generally refers to referencing
the different versions of a file during a merge operation (cf "git
ls-files --stage").

I agree, but I think it's better than "index" tho. That one is heavily
overloaded and easily confused with other meaning in other softwares.

quoted

I think starting by documenting the issues is a good idea, maybe on a
wiki, and start some draft of a proposed solution that would improve
in an iterative process.

And it would be nice if the issues were discussed in a way that
acknowledged that all changes have tradeoffs, both positive and
negative, and to clearly articulate whether the concern is just
someone going "uh, 'index' is a wierd term", but once they learn it,
it's pretty clear, versus a case where there is continuous confusion
due to overloaded meanings, or for people for whom English might not
be the first language.

Yes, of course there should be a list of both positive and negative
tradeoffs. But I think the "overloaded" argument can be easily solved
by renaming one of the overloads.

And most importantly, to avoid rheteroic.  In fact, given that strong
use of rhetoric is often used to disguise a weakness of a position
that can't be defended using logic and data, someone who tries to win
arguments using the "last post wins" style of discourse, and a heavy
use of rhetoric, may find that people just simply decide that it's a
better use of their time not to engage and to just kill the entire
thread.

Unfortunately yes, I see many people being silly in order to win
arguments, both in the pro-changes and against-changes side of the
discussion. I'd be much simpler to simply gather arguments on some
wiki and eventually do a vote when the list is complete about the
proposed change.

Philippe